Eckhart on Oprah

As you have undoubtedly heard, Oprah has created a little history.
Breaking out of her book club mold of recommending fiction and memoirs, she recommended a self-help book, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. Then she decided to develop a free 10 part online course, reviewing each chapter with Tolle. Tolle doesn’t usually do TV as its too short a format to explain it properly.

Over 700,000 people registered. “Monday night’s webcast was one of the
largest single online events in the history of the Internet. More than
500,000 people simultaneously logged on to watch Oprah Winfrey and
Eckhart Tolle live, resulting in 242 Gbps of information moving through the Internet.”

Obviously not everyone was able to join in. A number of people had connection issues. But downloads are available, making it much simpler. Just log in the next day (Tuesdays) and you can download in the Archive section at:

http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/webcast/archive/archive_download.jsp
(if you are not an Oprah member, they do oblige you to sign up. Just
uncheck everything but the Tolle series.)

The video downloads are available in higher resolution at about 1 GB
and lower res at about 500MB. The archives also have audio versions
and PDF transcripts. If you don’t normally download large files, you
may find something like Free Download Manager of use.
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ It will resume an interrupted
download and can pull down in 4 streams concurrently making it much
faster than just clicking to download. Its not a fast site.

TIP:
The videos are .m4v files, designed for iTunes only. A little Apple
trick. After the download, just change the file extension from .m4v to
the standard .mp4 and they’ll play in Quicktime and other players
fine. Even some DVD players will play MP4.

I’ve watched the first one now and am impressed with how they’ve gotten right to the nitty gritty – about humanities risk of survival, the nature of religion, and so forth. They’re not pulling punches. 3 of the 10 sessions are posted now.

An article about it:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-03-02-oprah-tolle_N.htm
The series site:
http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/webcast/oprah_anewearth_main.jsp

Certainly not yet directly competing with TV numbers but there were
people from all over the world connected, from Albania to Cambodia.
Interesting to consider where this is going. Even more interesting that a show drew over half a million people to hear about waking up. Times they are achangin’

Davidya

Last Updated on December 11, 2013 by Davidya