Livelook.tv Blog

The guys at Time Science have some interesting products.   The Time Window product is a cool time-lapse kiosk product. 

I’d love to see one of these installed somewhere.  It seems like something you might find at a visitor center for a park or something.  Even better might be a remote image viewer for a natural history museum or Park Service Headquarters.   Definitely a neat concept.   This company is coming up with some cool ideas and I wish them luck.

On the same topic, check out the time-lapse on the Boulder Flatiron Cam. It’s been running and recording the daily weather in Boulder for over a year now.

Airport View of Loveland, Colorado has set up a series of airport based cam systems around Colorado.  The company sells four-camera systems for aviation applications.  I’ve seen lots of single cam systems at airports but this is sold as a professional grade solution.   To me it seems that it’s only a matter of time before airport weather information systems include a visual component.   At some point aircraft could even have on board views of the local conditions for landing as Wi-Fi becomes more common in the air.   I’m surprised there’s no legal disclaimer or time stamp on the images.  There could be issues if a pilot is relying on an out of date image.   I’d want the site to show a technical difficulties screen or something instead of an outdated image.   They’re on the right track and this looks like a promising business application of live image technology.

Since I’m not a pilot, I’ll just enjoy some of their views around scenic areas of Colorado.  Maybe the Telluride airport is next?

Starwood Hotels has an innovative new marketing site called roomwithaview.com.   The site has links to live high quality cameras at their properties around the world.  This is a neat idea although I’m having trouble using the site.  For some reason I’m not able to click the individual properties within the map.   I think a better interface would be something along the lines of the wall of tvs where you could see each view in a panel.   The world map doesn’t highlight the visual appeal of a live image.

A sample from their Grand Maritian is below.  This may be the first webcam in Mauritius.

WeatherBonk.com was an early pioneer mashing up weather data with geolocated webcams.  

The site was launched in 2005 and was quietly acquired by The Weather Channel in 2007.   It’s not fully integrated with TWC site but you can often see the webcams featured on-air.  I’d guess they still have an issue using copyrighted webcam images without explicit permission.   It’s an interesting problem that I’ve thought about a lot with Livelook.tv.  It’s a great resource to locate and mashup webcam image data with other web information, but in the end who owns the images?   Weather Bonk must have been able to show the value of the mashup concept because it doesn’t seem like they had any other unique intellectual property or assets.   Many of the webcam views on Weatherbonk seem to come from the weatherbug API.  The Weather Channel should buy Weatherbug.com next if they really want their own proprietary webcam network.  

Congratulations to the Weatherbonk team.

The webcam universe keeps growing with more amazing cams showing up all the time.  I recently found the webcams at Takeabreak.co.nz, a site devoted to New Zealand tourism.  They’ve developed a network of high quality webcams to showcase New Zealand’s scenic beauty.  The webcam network pulls visitors to their well designed accommodation and activity booking engine.  

The thing that immediately stood out about the webcam images was the high quality and nice overlay on the images.   A question about this was quickly returned by the CEO of Takeabreak.  They’ve developed a custom 8 megapixel webcam solution to maximize the image quality in all lighting conditions.  Check out the results on their webcam page or this sample image from the Hanmer Springs webcam. 

 Happy New Year, New Zealand!

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.