One Md. Company Is Streaming The Entire Solar Eclipse From Above The Clouds

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- Millions of Americans will be directly beneath next Monday's total solar eclipse.

Stretching from west coast to east, Maryland will see 80 percent of the sun disappear.

Alex DeMetrick reports on the local company that will give the entire world a front row seat.

Next Monday, starting at 1 p.m. our time, the moon will cast a small shadow over the Oregon coast. It will speed east over the ground, a 70-mile-wide circle of darkness. The sun will be totally eclipsed by the moon.

InfoZen in Bethesda has spent months getting ready to stream the event live, from the cloud.

"And if you can't do it in the cloud, there's no way, no one has a server room to host that many viewers, especially when you're talking about a very short time span," says Manuel Miranda, InfoZen's COO.

The company is preparing for 50 times as many people than the number that streamed the Super Bowl.

"They're expecting up to a billion viewers, which dwarfs anything else that's been streamed," he says. "You can do it on your favorite smart phone. You can do it on your computer, your tablet, anywhere you can get to Google or NASA.gov, you can watch this."

And while weather will make or break eclipse watching from the ground, it won't online. That's because NASA will be tapping into a network of cameras along the eclipse route.

"NASA is going to be way above the clouds, from space, the weather balloons above and the jets that are going to be following from above," Miranda says. "So it's going to be fantastic. You're going to be able to see the eclipse one way or another."

You can watch the dramatic solar eclipse live on WJZ on Monday, and the First Warning Weather team will explain how the event unfolds and why it's so rare. Don't miss the Big Solar Show right here on WJZ.

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