By the way, there's a bunch of these videos on the NASA site. As the program progressed past the debris incident, more and more cameras were mounted and flown to watch for debris hitting the stack.
Later on, NASA added real time transmission of many of these and while they were using them for analysis, they also made for great viewing during live launches on NASA TV.
Many of the others are recorded on board and much of Flight Day 1 was spent dumping these down via Ku-band whenever the orbiter was in direct range of a Ku-band facility. It was way too much video/data to shove down through TDRSS at first.
TDRSS (the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) has had continual bandwidth upgrades throughout its lifespan and launch of newer satellites. They were doing encrypted video conferencing with personal doctors and family during personal time toward the end.
The problem was, toward the end the society and the media found none of these things even remotely interesting so you had to go hunt down NASA TV to watch. It's carried on both satellite TV vendor's lineups, is available direct via backyard dish, and rarely is found in CaTV lineups. They also stream it from NASA servers.
Some lucky folks at contractors can get NASA TV with the addition of "back room audio feeds" from the controller loops in Houston. I always wanted to sit in one of their theaters for a launch. The public audio feed is a mix of the Flight Control loop and the PAO/Announcer's mic, with a tech controlling the mix to typically drop many "bad news" items until they're cleared for public consumption.
Example, if you've ever heard the back room loops of Challenger, it didn't "go silent" at first. There were a number of reports of dropped data and other things until the general realization came over controller's that things had gone terribly wrong.
The recording we all hear in history is the "Roger, Go at throttle up" call, and the crackle of the UHF receiver losing carrier. And then the now famous poised announcer who said, "Obviously a major malfunction" when later in interviews he admitted he knew the STS stack was gone.
By the way, that throttle call is part of the Max-Q thing too. The Orbiter launches with a lot of power but as it approaches Max-Q the main engines were throttled back to reduce stress on the stack and the crew. Then at the appropriate time the engines come back up to full power. The crew has a callout because they're monitoring and they can force the issue if the automation doesn't push the engines back up.
If you watch older launches, the trajectory is slightly different and steeper. The dynamics and flight path were tweaked a few times over the course of all the launches to continue to provide safety margins while making the ride for the whole stack a little less stressful.
You also hear callous for various emergency runways around the globe and how many engines it would take to get there. Calls like "Two-engine Zaragoza".
Other calls are "Negative Return", "Press to MECO", etc. All very standardized. (MECO = Main Engine Cut-Off".)
Some info here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes
I was always trying to watch launches live whenever possible and digging for what the call-outs meant. The babbling PAO/Announcer over the top of the UHF radio calls was usually more annoying than helpful after a while.
