The State of the Union will be snapchatted, live-streamed, tweeted and, oh yeah, broadcast

Alyssa Bereznak
·National Correspondent, Technology
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Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

On Tuesday night, President Obama will deliver his sixth and final State of the Union address. And as details trickle out about what it will include, it’s clear that the administration is focused equally on both the message and the medium.

This, according to a Sunday evening Medium post by the White House’s chief digital officer and Twitter veteran Jason Goldman: “The American people will see a multi-platform streaming and social broadcast of the State of the Union that reflects the ways people experience live events in 2016,” he wrote. “We’ll be reaching people where they are — and making it possible for them to engage, respond, and share the president’s speech themselves in new and different ways.”

Specifically, the White House’s media team has partnered with Amazon to stream the address via its video platform as a way to reach “those who’ve cut the cord from cable and network TV” and now use smart TVs, laptops, mobile devices and tablets to watch shows. Per usual, the White House will also offer a live stream of the event on its YouTube channel and the White House website, and hold Twitter Q&As with top officials the following day. Meanwhile, the White House has premiered a project that features contextual notes from President Obama and his former staffers on past State of the Union speeches via the online annotation platform Genius. On Monday morning, the White House also announced it joined Snapchat to offer a behind-the-scenes view of the preparation leading up to the speech.

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Photo via Snapchat.

As Goldman notes, the effort to bring a multi-platform experience has emerged from a long history of broadcast mediums through which the State of the Union has been delivered. The very first TV broadcast of the annual speech was by Harry Truman in 1947, the first live webcast was delivered by George W. Bush in 2002, and Barack Obama was the first to introduce an enhanced live stream of the speech — which included text, graphs and images, alongside footage — in 2011.

And just so they’ll have at least one guest who fully appreciates all these efforts, Michelle Obama will be sitting alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the audience. How’s that for a tech-savvy administration?

Watch the State of the Union right here. Coverage and commentary hosted by Katie Couric begins at 8:45 pm Eastern.