Starting in October 2010, all Nobel Prize announcements will be streamed live on the official Nobel Prize YouTube channel. Clips of previous announcements and ceremonies will also be available on the channel. New clips will be posted as video on-demand a few hours after the live webcast.
Nominations, announcements, and ceremonies will be featured for all 5 Nobel Prizes: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and the Peace Prize. The live feed will also include announcements and ceeremonies relevant to the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, also known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This is not technically a Nobel Prize, and is not administered by a Nobel Committee. However, it is identified with the other prizes and is awarded in the same month.
The live stream will include exclusive interviews with members of the Nobel Committee. Viewers will also be able to submit questions for all the 2010 Nobel Laureates, the answers to which will be posted in December. This is the first time that the general public has been able to interact directly with all the Nobel laureates.
The first live webcast on the Nobel Prize YouTube channel was on October 4, 2010, when Dr. Robert G. Edwards was declared the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Edwards is a pioneer in reproductive technology and medicine. The in vitro fertilization technique developed by him and Patrick Steptoe resulted in the 1978 birth of Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test tube” baby.
The Nobel Prizes came into being as a result of a posthumous bequest by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel donated nearly his entire fortune to establish a series of annual prizes for those innovators whose work conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind.” The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, in the original 5 disciplines which were established by Nobel in his will. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was added in 1969, when Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, established the prize on the bank’s 300th anniversary and endowed it in perpetuity.
The live feed uses the Adobe Flash platform. It is high definition, so to see it, you will need to ensure you have sufficient bandwidth. Your Internet provider may also impose size transfer limits. If computer or Internet limitations are a problem, the Nobel Prizes can also be followed on Twitter or on the Nobel Prize webpage, which currently receives over 40 million visitors a year.
