The Emmy’s might be coming up this weekend, but Pope Francis is sure to steal the stage as cable’s superstar starting early next week. The Pope will begin his trip to the United States on September 22nd, going through the 27th and will hit Washington, D.C, New York, and Philadelphia. Thanks to our highly connected society, millions of people will be along for the journey, in person and over television sets, computer screens, iPhones and social media platforms, and especially on cable networks nationwide.
In addition to the many national news and religious networks that will be broadcasting the Pope’s appearances live, Time Warner Cable will be documenting his every word and move for all of us who can’t follow his entire journey to the U.S. The cable network is offering a channel solely dedicated to covering the Pope’s visit around the clock. Time Warner’s 15 million household subscribers in New York and other areas around the country will have access to the channel.
Steve Paulus, Time Warner Cable’s senior vice president for news, told The New York Times that the additional channel gives viewers more options. Some would prefer not to watch nonstop coverage of masses and speeches. “At a certain point, when you’re a news channel, you still want to be giving weather on the 1s and providing the coverage people want,” he said. The 24-hour coverage will also be accessible to subscribers online through a live stream and via the Time Warner Cable news app, should someone want to watch Pope Francis’s address to members of Congress as it happens.
Other network coverage includes C-SPAN, which will air the Congressional address live and online at c-span.org. And the Papal visit is sure to be widely covered on a variety of channels.
The last time a Pope visited the U.S. was back in 2008 when Benedict XVI made the trip. At the time, Twitter was barely starting to gain its momentum (the Pope didn’t even have a Twitter account) and many of the video and picture-sharing social media platforms hadn’t yet made their debuts. This time around, the online media landscape will be much more active and crowded. Already the hashtag #PopeinUS is highly active. To help all those tweets, video streams, photos, apps and data exchanges run smoothly, Comcast will offer free Wi-Fi in Philadelphia, making the Pope’s visit more interactive and accessible for audiences.
The evolution of technologies in just seven years speaks to how far we’ve come in the digital era, and how cable has helped us advance by keeping pace with the demand for fast and complete coverage of big news events like a Papal visit. Catholic or not, Pope Francis’s popularity with broad audiences cannot be denied, and cable will be there to provide the platform where people can not only watch and listen to his speeches, but capture and exchange memories of the experience, even when they can’t be in his presence.