Tournament of Roses Parade

From WIkipedia:

The Tournament of Roses Parade, better known as the Rose Parade, is "America's New Year Celebration", a festival of flower-covered floats, marching bands, equestrians and a college football game on New Year's Day (but moved to Monday if New Year's Day falls on a Sunday), produced by the non-profit Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association.

The annual parade was first held January 1, 1890 in Pasadena, California. Today, the Rose Parade is watched in person by hundreds of thousands of spectators on the parade route, and is broadcast on multiple television networks in the United States (ABC holds the official contract, but because it is a public parade, other networks are allowed to produce their own coverage.It is seen by millions more on television worldwide in more than 200 international territories and countries. The Rose Bowl college football game was added in 1902 to help fund the cost of staging the parade.

The parade is televised on ABC, NBC, Univision (in Spanish), HGTV, The Travel Channel, RFD TV, and KTLA (the latter three offer interruption-free coverage, although KTLA repeats the parade throughout the day with commercials). WGN TV in Chicago will carry KTLA's uninterrupted coverage of the 2009 parade (WGN and KTLA are both owned by Tribune Broadcasting).[9] Until 2007, the parade was also broadcast on CBS, and KTTV also televised the parade for many years until 1995. Joining the broadcast in 2010 will be the Hallmark Channel.

The 1954 edition of the parade was also the first program ever televised in the NTSC color television format nationwide on NBC.

* 2009 Parade was broadcast to 217 countries (79 countries live) in over 20 languages

* Tournament of Roses website had approximately 13 million hits during the week of the 2009 parade

* Website was viewed in 150 countries

* 2010 Parade was watched via TV in 127 countries, "throughout the world" (read the announcers) including China.