14 DAY TRIAL // Tiger Woods made his first public appearance in three months after the huge scandal made a serious dent in his reputation, career, his marriage, and so on. Interestingly, he chose to offer his apologies online and live, bypassing traditional media coverage. While the actual apology probably didn't fool that many people, it seems to have done the trick and boosted his approval quite a bit. Regardless of the outcome, it's clear that people really wanted to know what he had to say, with almost 700,000 tuning into the live video on Ustream alone.
Considering that the public statement was made very early in the morning in the US, at 8 am PT/11 am ET, and on a work day, the numbers are impressive. To be specific, 683,000 watched it live on Ustream, one of the most popular live streaming services. While there was only one source for the stream, the video was carried by several other outlets as well, including the AP and CNN, which had their own separate broadcasts. The AP feed was carried by Livestream, another competitor in the emerging online live streaming market. Hulu also streamed the public statement and it was carried by all the major TV broadcasters in the US.
Finally, the event was streamed by YouTube as well on its own Citizentube channel it usually reserves for things like US Presindent Barack Obama's public addresses. The YouTube stream seems to have fared worse than Ustream, for example, with a little over 48,000 views including the ones after the live event, this despite the fact that it had the best quality stream, all the way up to HD-level 720p. Certainly, not the biggest numbers YouTube has seen.
Not only were a lot of people watching Woods' apology, but they were talking about it as well, with over 93,000 tweets about it in just the first hour after the stream. Ustream's live chat feature, one of the main draws of the site, was disabled during the actual stream, so it only managed to rack up 3,300 comments. In any case, fake or not, the apology managed to sway the hearts of quite a few people and, according to one digital-marketing firm, Woods' approval rating hit 68 percent, up from a low point of 48 percent in December. Still, he has some way to go before reaching the approval rating he had before the whole scandal, a sky-high 91 percent.