Media Attention
Not two days after the pups were born, the first news articles about the "B" team started appearing. One of the first was on a Los Angeles NBC affiliate's website. Cute Overload, where many people first learned of the original pups in October 2008, again featured the pups on their website. The sites Gawker.com and Mashable.com also featured the pups. Before their one-week birthday, the puppies' national attention grew as they appeared on PeoplePets.com as well as The Bay Area Blog of The New York Times. A few days later the puppies were in the national spotlight again in the L.A. Unleashed section of the Los Angeles Times.
On November 14, 2008, NBC Nightly News broadcast a live feed of the camera to its national TV audience. On November 15, 2008, The Today Show interviewed the founders of Ustream about the puppies. On November 18, 2008, CNN coverage played several clips from the feed. Bill O'Reilly used footage from the camera as representative of the overall trend of popular animal videos on the Internet. On December 11, 2008, Jeff Horwich of Minnesota Public Radio posted a song written about the puppy cam. Other major broadcast networks, including MSNBC and ABC, have also broadcast the feed. The puppies have been featured in magazines including Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, and online sites like boingboing, dlisted and Gawker.
In April 2009, the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam was nominated for a Webby Award in the Viral category, and won the People’s Voice Award. According to UStream, the Puppy Cam triumphed over nearly 10,000 entries from more than 60 countries.
In December 2010, Kika and her litter were featured on Animal Planet's Dogs 101 - Shiba Inu segment where the phenomenon of the puppy cam was noted.
In the animated cartoon The Mighty B! episode "Awww-esome!", the puppy cam's webcast was parodied as a "Puppy Net", and all of the show's characters were hooked on watching it.
The Shiba Inu Puppy Cam was cited in the introduction of Cesar Millan's 2009 book, How to Raise the Perfect Dog: Through Puppyhood and Beyond in which Cesar notes that he was "impressed".
In 2012 the couple turned down offers from Ricky Lake and Anderson Cooper to appear on their TV shows.
Read more about this topic: Shiba Inu Puppy Cam
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