To begin understanding the curious phenomenon of “Webcams” or Web cameras, ask yourself this: Is a live picture of a cat sunning itself on a rug an event likely to draw thousands of spectators? Then consider this: During the four days after the print edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer published an April 22 feature about it, the KittyCam.com Web site logged more than 2,500 individual visitors a day. These were all people who came for a live view of an ordinary cat laying next to an ordinary patio door.

There’s nothing more to KittyCam.com than that: A three-inch by four-inch live Web page image that refreshes every five minutes and shows an 8-year-old black cat’s latest moves - or lack of them. Yet, thousands of people every month have used their computers to stare at this scene inside a nondescript room in Santa Cruz, Calif.

As such, KittyCam is a good demonstration of the seemingly mundane yet peculiarly compelling appeal of Webcam reality “coverage” for growing masses of the Internet-accessing public.

Webcams - some call them “Netcams” - are digital cameras wired to a computer that is rigged to transmit the captured images across a phone line connection to a Web page display.

Essentially anyone with a little computer know-how and a round-the-clock Internet connection can aim a Web camera at anything and display the resulting live images on the Internet. Most publicity about this technology has so far focused on its more bizarre or gimmicky uses. Cameras have been mounted in the bedrooms of young women who willingly undress for the lens; others have been aimed at the cockroach cages of a university entomology lab; and still others bring you the view of a small tropical fish aquarium in someone’s apartment.

Mainstream Media Interest

But meanwhile, growing numbers of mainstream media organizations have also been incorporating Webcams into their sites to provide a new genre of news and visual features that often are as novel as they are intriguing.

For instance, at NOLA Live (www.nolalive.com), the New Orleans Web site of the Times-Picayune, the most heavily trafficked feature is the “BurboCam” page. The Times-Picayune, a member of the Advance Publications chain, mounted an all-weather Web camera above the door of the Cats Meow bar in the center of the French Quarter. Now, 24 hours a day, visitors can log on to NOLA Live, click to BurboCam and view a live image of the main intersection of Bourbon and St. Peter’s streets. It’s a scene lined on both sides by 18th and 19th century buildings housing some of the country’s most famous blues clubs and jazz joints. In the morning, the BurboCam shows the street to be vacant except for the occasional delivery truck. By afternoon, clusters of camera-toting strollers begin to appear. After dark, the sidewalks fill - often shoulder-to-shoulder in density - as people roam from bar to bar in one of the country’s most colorful entertainment districts. During the recent Mardi Gras, the late-night live view was one of a human circus of costumed, inebriated, cavorting revelers. Once you bookmark this site, it’s hard not to return just to take a another peek at the craziness that passes for the tourist business there.

And perhaps that’s the point. Webcam images are a form of perpetual raw news coverage available to the anyone in the world whenever they care to see what’s going on in downtown New Orleans or other places that pique their curiosity.

See Inside a TV Studio

For instance, because they know the public is fascinated with the celebrities of the TV news business, the managers of TV station WRAL-5 in Raleigh, N.C., recently installed a Webcam in their own studio newsroom. The camera is mounted at the opposite end of the studio from the broadcast cameras to provide an intimate view of what the anchors and the rest of the technical crew sees as they conduct each broadcast. The image updates every 30 seconds.

The Webcam, which allows Web surfers to look inside the news studio at any time, is promoted regularly on TV and has proven very popular. John Conway, WRAL-TV’s online services manager, said that in the seven weeks prior to April 1, the studio Webcam tallied 10,784 page views. In a more utilitarian vein, a number of government organizations now use networks of outdoor, pole-mounted Webcams to provide continuous reports on weather and traffic conditions - a service that appears to directly compete with that of traditional local news organizations like newspapers, radio and TV stations.

For instance, the Arizona Department of Administration Trailmaster site displays images from 40 Webcams set up throughout the Phoenix metropolitan area with all images accessible from a single Web page. Around the Seattle region, the Washington State Department of Transportation (DOT) has similarly mounted 50 Webcams aimed at critical sections of roadway.

Anyone with Internet access can log on and actually look at the weather or real-time conditions on a particular stretch of road. There’s no waiting for the desired information, as with radio or TV. Web users instantly get live views along their intended route. One can only wonder how long it will be before these highway Webcam home pages begin including banner advertising aimed at an audience of affluent daily commuters.

Mimicking News?

In fact, a surprising number of non-news organizations are using Webcams in ways that mimic some of the most basic services of news organizations. For instance, in San Francisco, four communication companies involved in designing corporate Web sites have set up a Webcam to provide constant, live coverage of construction progress at that city’s new PacBell baseball stadium of the San Francisco Giants. Local sports buffs who used to have to wait for newspapers or TV stations’ occasional updates on such projects can now see a live view of the construction site any time night or day at Whole Earth Networks’ Pac Bell Ballpark Webcam site.

The four high-tech firms that support the site - Whole Earth Networks, the Kenwood Group, Virtual Shopper and Basic Telepresence - have also included their own banner ads on the page. Whole Earth marketing manager John G. Stark said traffic has been heavy, with an unexpected amount of it coming from overseas. Local reaction has also been intense - he’s even received e-fan mail from the Web-surfing construction workers who are erecting the stadium.

Early Webcams

The concept of the Webcam or Netcam is as old as the Web itself and, like so much else in cyberspace, evolved as something of an accident at places like KPIX-TV in San Francisco.

Back in 1994, unaware that the Internet even existed, KPIX-TV general manager Harry Fuller decided to mount a live, auto-focus video camera on the top of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel on Knob Hill - one of the highest points in the city. It was a promotional gimmick designed to provide live weather and skyline images for use in news programming. Fuller originally thought that such a rooftop camera might even capture occasional downtown fires or the odd aircraft carrier steaming into the bay, adding some variety to his news shows’ visuals.

But, David Meharg, one of the station engineers involved in setting up that camera atop the Fairmont was also an early Nethead. He was experimenting with the idea of transmitting a still image captured by a video camera to an Internet site.

Months later, Meharg announced to Fuller that he had succeeded in feeding the camera image onto the Internet and told Fuller, “We’re getting a lot of hits on our Web site.”

“What’s a Web site?” Fuller remembers asking.

That hotel camera, among the earliest of the now proliferating Webcams, planted the seed in Fuller’s mind for what has become one of the most successful local TV-affiliated sites in the world - one that still prominently features Webcam images on its “front page.”

KPIX, which is now part of a sprawling regional media alliance with the San Jose Mercury News the Contra Costa Times and four other Knight-Ridder newspapers in California, offers an array of Webcam images available through its own as well as its partners’ sites. The views include live images of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and other San Francisco scenes.

Curious Visual Pleasures

Even back in 1994, what Meharg unilaterally created for KPIX generated immediate glowing e-mail feedback from people all over the world. They described their pleasure and sense of homesickness at seeing through far away computer screens - whenever the mood struck them - the fabled San Francisco skyline. To Fuller, the power of the Webcam, and the Web itself, became simultaneously obvious.

“I realized that we were reaching a huge audience,” Fuller said. “People were starting to use us as a screen saver. I said there’s got to be something here - people are looking at us and we haven’t even promoted this thing.”

Fuller later went on to a stint as vice president of CBS Interactive and is now news director of Ziff-Davis’ soon-to-be-launched cable channel, ZDTV, an operation that hopes to revolutionize the use of video-generating Webcams into something approaching true TV-Web convergence.

Webcams are natural fixtures at TV stations because many stations already have video cameras mounted in remote locations. Often stations use microwave transmitters to beam the pictures back to their studios and it’s no great trick to route that signal into a Web-server computer that can digitize and transfer the images to the Internet. Cam technology is a little more foreign to newspaper and radio sites, but they’re slowly catching up.

Newspapers Get the Idea

Newspapers like Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle - which shares and cross-promotes its “Live@ugusta Cam” with local TV affiliate WRDW-TV - can easily mount one or more remote cameras and use them to capture and transmit interesting still images to Web audiences.

“Newspapers should know the value of just offering people a look outside their windows,” explained Joseph Trotz, director of new media at the Chronicle. He said his “Live@ugusta” Webcams play particularly well to relocated former Augusta residents. “People who’ve responded the most to the cams are people who used to live in Augusta and want a view of the town. What better way than to give them a view of what’s out the window right now? They’re so happy to have this way of keeping up.”

The E.W. Scripps newspaper company has taken a more sophisticated approach to Webcams and, in fact, may have the most interesting setup of any media company. Its TCPalm.com Web site, which is shared by five newspapers and TV station WPTV in the Treasure Coast-Palm Beach area of Florida, includes a camera mounted on a tower in West Palm Beach that can look up and down the Intercoastal Waterway. What makes it so different is that the live camera can be controlled by the viewer. At the Web page, a viewer can click on the image and the camera will move in that direction. The view is a constantly changing one of boats coming and going against a backdrop of Palm Beach condominiums and lushly fringed river bank.

The Palm Beach camera is formatted so that Web users can zoom in on boats or individual cars at up to 12 times magnification, while also panning the camera in any direction with image clicks. Two other Webcams on the TCPalm site provide a 360-degree view of Palm Beach and an idyllic view of the St. Lucie River.

“We’ve also used the live cam in conjunction with news stories,” explained TCPalm new media manager Stephen Dana. “For example, when the ‘Endeavor’, a replica of the ship Capt. James Cook sailed in the Pacific, was docked in the intracoastal in West Palm, we put a Web camera link to the ship on the main page of the site in conjunction with the news story. It’s an excellent tool to make the user feel as if they are really there.”

Tools for Hard News

Webcams similarly demonstrated their potential as powerful hard news tools last year when catastrophic floods cut a wide swath across the central portion of the continent. The most dramatic example of this took place in devastated Grand Forks, N.D., where the Web site of the Grand Forks Herald kept a Webcam in operation recording the mounting destruction until the waters destroyed the camera itself.

But news organizations in other areas also made aggressive use of Webcams as “Flood Cams” during the catastrophe. Another, for instance, was WCPO-TV (Channel 9), the local ABC affiliate in Cincinnati, Ohio. It has a Web camera mounted 400 feet above the ground on a highrise rooftop. That “SkyCam9″ unit can be swiveled 360 degrees and zoomed in and out to provide panoramic views of the river side of the city. During the weather emergency, users could go to the WCPO home page at any time to see live images of the river rising along the Ohio and Kentucky border, spilling over its banks and innundating whole neighorhoods - a view that was as useful to emergency officials as it was compelling to onlookers from half a continent away.

WCPO then collected some of the most dramatic images and still makes them available as a permanent “Great Flood of ‘97″ visual documentary on its Web site.

Warm Links Strategy

In cities with chilly climates, some news Web sites try to lure viewers by providing comprehensive feature reports about, and links to, warm-weather Webcams elsewhere. Others, like Channel 4000, the Web site of WCCO-TV and WCCO-Radio in Minneapolis, have taken that concept even further and approached Webcams as a topic of ongoing editorial coverage.

In a large section of the Channel4000.com site, Parker Hodges maintains the “Net Cam” page which documents, spotlights and rates Webcam features around the country and the world. The items include a text description, a live link and a rating, expressed in tiny camera icons - one icon being the worst rating; four being the best. One of the recent features detailed a series of Webcams focused on Italian volcano sites. The standing list offers many Webcams pointed at beach scenes.

The more tropical the scenes are, Hodges says, the better Minnesotans like them. It doesn’t even matter if the photo quality is any good. “Most people are looking for a feeling of warmth, they’re not necessarily looking for the quality of the camera,” he said. “I try to hook into that idea of going to a sunny beach in winter, so a lot of time I hook in to the Southern Hemisphere.”

Hodges said he doesn’t know the exact traffic figures of the cams he features but figures they draw Web viewers who might not otherwise have looked at Channel 4000. From November through March, he received more than 700 e-mail messages about his tropical Webcam features.

“People enjoy them, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I even have an elementary class that checks it out once a week.”

But not everyone in the news industry is as enthusiastic about including such Webcam coverage on their Web sites. Jason Primuth, executive producer of Edina, Minn.-based Internet-Broadcasting System (IBS) complains that Webcams draw attention away from a media Web site’s primary function -the rapid delivery of quality content. Primuth terms Webcam images “content-less content.” Nevertheless, his IBS operations, which produce Channel 4000 and sites attached to Los Angeles’ KCBS-TV and Portland, Ore.’s KOIN-TV, all feature Webcams. “Webcams are cheap and so easy to do,” Primuth said. “Everyone loves them, but there’s no actual content there. How many lives are enriched by seeing what comes from a camera on top of a water tower? But you can’t argue with the numbers.”

“The image off the top of the KOIN tower in Portland is seen thousands of times a day, just because it’s featured on the front page of the site,” he bemoaned.

Electronic Systems
NEWS TOOL, Webcams