This is it: President Obama and Governor Romney will meet Monday to face off the third and final presidential debate before the election next month. This time around, it will be all about foreign policy issues. The event will be held in Boca Raton, Fla., and and once again broadcasted by numerous TV networks in the U.S. and beyond.
Won’t be able to watch the debate on TV? No worries, there are plenty of options to follow live streams of it on your computer, iPad or mobile phone. Once the event starts, apps will help you to live-check the statements in real time and voice your support for either candidate. And after everything is said and done, we’ll help you to find sites that host archived versions of the debate.
Check out our ultimate guide for watching the third and final presidential debate online:
Where to watch it live
- The debate officially starts at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT. It will last 90 minutes, and it will be moderated by Face the Nation moderator and CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer.
- ABC News will be streaming the debate live on its YouTube channel as well as the YouTube politics channel and ABC’s iPad app.
- NBC will stream the debate on its NBCPolitics.com site.
- CBS News will have its live stream up on Ustream.
- CNN will stream the debate on its website as well as to to its iOS apps.
- Fox News will be streaming the debate on its site and feature some insights into the most popular topics of the evening through an exclusive collaboration with Twitter during its post-debate coverage.
- The Wall Street Journal is providing a live feed of the debate on it site as well as through its WSJ Live apps on the iPad, on Android devices and various Smart TV platforms.
- The Washington Post will stream the debate on its site.
- Hulu will feature live feeds from ABC, Fox and The Wall Street Journal, including pre- and post-debate content.
- Politico’s website will feature a pre-debate show starting at 5 p.m. PT as well as the actual debate and some post-debate coverage.
- Univision’s live stream of the presidential debate will be translated into Spanish in real time.
- C-SPAN is going to stream the debate on it site as part of its debates hub. C-SPAN’s live feed comes with closed captions, which can be turned on here.
- PBS Newshour will stream the entire debate on its site as well.
- Microsoft’s Xbox will show the debate through the Elections 2012 app, which will also feature some live polling (Xbox LIVE gold membership required).
- TuneIn will feature live audio streams of the debate on its website as well as within its mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and other mobile platforms.
What to do during the debate
- The rules both parties agreed on ahead of the debate can be found here.
- The Peel companion app will allow Android users to digitally cheer and boo during the debate, and see how others like the performance of both candidates.
- Ponderoo does something similar for iOS, but with a more playful UI.
- ConnecTV will poll users of its second screen app (available for iPad, Windows and OS X) in real time about the performance of both candidates.
- Al Jazeera English once again teamed up with Reddit for context and commentary during the debate.
- Twitter is providing curated tweets on its #debates micro-site.
- PolitiFact and Factcheck.org will be fact checking the debate in real time on Twitter — follow their accounts, @politifact and @factcheckdotorg, to see whether both candidates are telling the truth.
- The Sunlight Foundation will again fact-check the debate in real time and provide a live stream with contextual data as part of its Sunlight Live project.
- The Debate Drinking Game is a less serious take on the rhetorics used during the event (please drink responsibly).
Where to catch up on the debate
- Archived streams: Hulu, PBS Newshour, C-SPAN and many of the other sites mentioned above are making an archived stream of the entire event available after it concludes. After the second debate, our readers told us that C-SPAN was one of the first to have an archived version up. Please let us know in the comments which site has a full-length archived version of the debate first this time around!
- Transcript: The Commission on Presidential Debates will host a transcript of the debate on its site.
We will update this post with new links right up to the start of the debate. Let us know in the comments if you come across any other good resources!
For more on how to watch news and other TV programming without paying for cable, check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.
