Oprah Eckhart Chapter 2 & the Soul Series Premier

Ditching school means that you have to ask your friends in class for their notes, but what do you do if the teacher does not show up? This is what happened to perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who scoured Oprah.com last Monday night (May 12) looking for the 1st installment of the Soul Series. It simply wasn't there.

There were opportunities to pay money to listen to the interviews on XM online & there were opportunities to sign up for a 30 day free trial of XM radio, but no video of the Soul Series premier, free or otherwise, could be found. Knowing that the audience Eckhart & Oprah had so effectively built over 10 weeks had become quite attached to Monday nights with Oprah, we thought it was a fatal error to offer nothing to those who eagerly tuned to see the Soul Series premier.

It reminded us of the first Oprah-Eckhart webcast, which you remember was jammed because too many people were watching & the Harpo team didn't have enough bandwidth. (So no one saw that premier either). Many people never returned from that 1st week of frustration nor did they bother to deal with the large proprietary Macintosh-platform download files that are not PC friendly. This is how we got in the business of providing these videos for free in YouTube format.

So if you have subscribed to our video newsletter & got the full webcast of Chapter 1 in your e-mail inbox last week, you are able now to see in full the beginning of the Eckhart-Oprah paradigm shift with no interruption. (If you have not subscribed to our video newsletter & would like to be included in the weekly mailing of the entire A New Earth webcast, free, go to the top right of this page to sign up).

So what happened to the new Soul Series? Well, we found it at Oprah.com 2 days after its premier date, Wednesday, and here is our report:

1. The program segments run 23 minutes. On the original XM satellite feed, that allows 7 minutes of commercials between program segments.

2. There is a big XM satellite logo in the lower right corner of the video screen, just in case you share the video with a friend & have forgotten where you got it.

3. Oprah's radio studio is very attractive. It's set-up to have a video shoot of high quality. The only clue that it's radio is the big microphones on giant wands coming up from the floor. Nobody is wearing headphones. It's all very cool, although why not use lapel mikes & eliminate the radio look entirely?

4. We only get the 1st segment. The last 3 come tonight, a full week after the premier date. Why the wait?

Overall the interview with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is interesting. It was obviously recorded while Oprah was in the midst of her webcast with Eckhart, since she makes many references to the webcast & his work. But it is disappointing. Why? Because we don't have Eckhart's presence filling the screen. These 2 women are talking about spiritual experience rather than embodying it.

Know Thyself!

Last night's show, Chapter 7, was advertised as the program to understand who each of us really are. In the process of this discussion a lot happened during the webcast:

1. The opening moment of silence grew to an all time record of 54 seconds!

2. Oprah caught Eckhart's cold.

3. There were many interruptions in the feed to our Southern Arizona location. Interestingly, instead of completely stopping, the feed went from 450 kbs to 30 kbs. A very blurry Oprah & Eckhart could be seen while their voices degraded to a bad cell phone connection. Not good, but much better than the picture freezing with no sound that has happened in the past. Maybe they are trying to increase the number of viewers without increasing bandwidth.

4. The preponderance of young women as questioners has now grown to the overwhelming majority. So much for the mid-lifers - Oprah.com was not interested in their questions last night.

On the brighter side, Eckhart introduced a wonderful new interpretation of the Christian cross. He explained that the horizontal bar represents daily life and the vertical represents spiritual life. The spiritual vertical is the Timeless Now and the daily horizontal brings the stress that comes from "not being in the present moment."

So once again Eckhart indirectly hammers away at the negative connotations of Original Sin & the Crucifixion by saying "negativity is never a good way of dealing with a situation". You'll see all of this and more in this week's webcast.

A New Earth Web Event: It Worked!

After a bumpy start, Oprah & her crew easily corrected the inherent problem of webcasts with wide appeal-bandwidth.

By reducing the optional image size & compressing the signal to more YouTube-like quality, the Oprah production team managed to maintain a steady 460 kbps stream throughout the program. Did she limit the viewership so that those who were watching could continue watching? That information is not yet available.

What we do know is that not only did the program stream flawlessly to our southern Arizona location, but the content improved as well. Some folks in our circles complained that Oprah dominated the first webcast, filling in the gaps or natural pauses that occur during a spiritual transmission to make sure there was no "dead air."

This was conspicuously absent in the 2nd installment, where Tolle was doing most of the talking not only during the Oprah-Eckart dialogue but also dominating the answers to listener questions. Early in this second program, Tolle asks Oprah if she could be silent for 10 seconds & she agreed while sharing how difficult it is for someone in broadcasting to simply allow complete silence.

Oprah demonstrated a depth of knowledge & familiarity with some of the subtler material which was delightfully surprising-allowing Eckhart to unequivocally set his own depth. It didn't matter how superficial a listener question might be; both of them seemed unrestricted in following their thread. Oprah also did an excellent job of "Devil's Advocate", questioning his teachings in a way that made them clearer. In short, the paradigm shift has arrived.

Blowing out the Internet

"I'm just hoping to have a successful class and that we don't blow out the Internet."

Oprah Winfrey, USA Today 3-3-08


Oprah's webcast "A New Earth" with Eckhart Tolle did not blow out the Internet, but it sure did blow up the servers she had dedicated to stream her webcast live.

The much anticipated webcast - a paradigm shift for Cultural Creatives world-wide - scored 500,000 simultaneous log-ins.

That would be all well and good, but the gathering multitudes resulted in 242 Gbps of information moving over the web at the same time, resulting in jerky, buffered reception at best & completely stalled feeds at worst.

The obvious solution is more bandwidth & more servers.

Interestingly, when we received the next notification e-mail "Week 2: Your Special Link to Oprah's Live Web Event", we are told that "our goal is to provide as many of you as possible with a positive experience. If we should see a significant decline in video quality, we may limit the size of the class that evening."

Is Oprah clogging the pipes of the Internet backbones? Or is there a ceiling on the bandwidth budget for this project? For those "midlifers who are seeking spiritual growth", their inexperience & frustration may dampen enthusiasm at least for the live interactive aspect of the class. It looks like Oprah is learning about this right along with us. We'll just see what happens tonight. Until then, to help pick-up where we left off, here's the last section of last week's class: