Livelook.tv Blog

Villa Serendipity on Chocolate Hole Bay – St. John, US Virgin Islands has brought the world an awesome webcam. View the cam at http://www.serendipity.vi. The view of the bay and St. Thomas in the background makes me think of Jimmy Buffet songs and heading for the islands.

This is a great use of a webcam for marketing a vacation rental. A webcam is another way to stand out in the crowd of rental properties. As a customer you know exactly what kind of view your going to get and can check before and after your vacation. It’s also a great way to keep your customers engaged and coming back to your website.

There are a few traditional revenue streams available if you want to create your own outdoor webcam site.

• Advertising (Google AdSense, Local advertising, other ad networks if you have enough views)
• Sponsorship – payment from sponsors to generate traffic and awareness from your webcam. Lots of restaurants sponsor webcams or at least provide a location.

Some newer options that are becoming more common:

• Donations – PayPal Donations are becoming much more common to see on webcam sites.


Subscriptions – I’d be interested to hear how people are doing with subscriptions. I think this is an upcoming area that will get some focus. Smart owners are distributing small images free to anyone but reserving the higher quality content for subscribers. My recent post about trainorders.com talked about their value add subscription services.
• In-image advertising – this is really a new area that very few seem to be taking advantage of. The owners of Halifaxwebcam.ca in Halifax, Nova Scotia are doing innovative things in this area.

Overall the quality of stand-alone webcams is improving and the price is falling. Combined with vastly improved bandwidth options such as wi-fi and hopefully wi-max the logistical challenges of placing a live webcam are also coming down. A solar powered webcam would be a nice improvement that would allow you to operate without being tethered to electricity. By approaching your webcam site as a business your ability to provide better views, more features and even make money are all improved.

I’ve seen very few outdoor webcams where users pay to view or subscribe. There are a lot of sites that accept donations but just like the rest of the web most people want free. Indoor cams may be a whole different story but that’s not the focus at Livelook.

Trainorders.com is a railfan focused website that’s hit upon outdoor webcam content people will pay to watch. They have four live cams set up at railroading hot spots around the country. Tehachapi in California is their original webcam with over nine years of service. It’s been updated over time to include full motion video and sound. Members of the site can also see stored movies of past trains. It’s a pretty cool system.

I’m impressed with their innovative marketing around the images. The have a live still image of each camera with their copyright info and the site URL. Allowing anyone on the web to embed your image and link to your site is a smart move and will drive more traffic to the pay site. Linking page is here.

It’s been about a year since the boulderflatironcam went live.    One interesting thing was the huge interest from Mac dashboard users.  The latest Mac OS 10.5 has the ability to grab any image on the web and automatically create a dashboard widget.  It’s a nice feature and makes the image accessible but put a lot of load on the hosting server.  The original image was 120k and with thousands of requests per second my hosting account was shut down.  To alleviate this I created a small php generated thumbnail of the original large 120k image.  This thumbnail is available to all at http://boulderflatironcam.com/camera0.jpg    The large image is now blocked for direct access but can still be viewed online at http://boulderflatironcam.com/boulderflatironlarge.html  This change has stabilized the hosting account and allows me to keep the costs low enough to continue providing the site.  The StarDot NetcamXL has worked very well in all sorts of weather conditions.   The support team from Stardot even helped tune up the color balance in the image.   I’d recommend the StarDot webcam as a good solid network cam that hasn’t needed any maintenance over the last year.  If there was just a way to keep the enclosure lens clean it would be maintenance free!  View of the camera installation.  From this shot you can see the webcam captures only a slice of the great view.      

Another live cam favorite in the San Diego area is Camzone Networks. Camzone specializes in live streaming views of Del Mar Beach, Imperial Beach, Scripps Pier, SeaWorld Shamu cam, San Diego Zoo Cam and others.

The Del Mar Beachcam has been around more than ten years. It’s still nice to watch the breaking waves and people walking on the beach.

The Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma near San Diego has some nice webcam views.

Cam one with a view to the north of the entrance to San Diego Harbor.

Cam two has a great view of San Diego airport and the city.

More live webcam views of United States National Parks can be found at the National Park Service Webcam page.

A good related site for government sponsored air quality webcams is the AIRnow – Air Quality site. AIRnow is a good listing of many high quality live images. Of course you can search for these cams on Livelook and save to My Livelook for your personal webcam dashboard.