Livelook.com 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.

Flying Frontier into San Jose last week on Spike the Porcupine I had a great view of the green springtime hills south of San Jose.  Being a webcam fan, of course had to check out what Livelook had in the area.  Morgan Hill Weather popped up just south of San Jose in Morgan Hill, California.   I don’t know how highly rated this webcam was but I just added it to My Livelook as a 5!  The view from high up one of the hills is really spectacular.   The high quality image is enhanced with a cool beta interactive control for pan/tilt/zoom.  The PTZ controls are overlaid right in the image.  Nice Feature!    Thanks to morganhillweather.com! The site had a link to a nearby telescope with another great view.  The Mount Hamilton HamCams are located at the Lick Observatory visitors center.   The cams have a commanding view of San Jose, Morgan Hill and greater Silicon Valley.   The daily movie feature is one of the best time lapse features I’ve seen.  Three minute images provide a lot of detail.    

Tucson, Arizona is a city with a fabulous climate, great mexican food and a place that sounds awfully good in March.   The Pima County department of environmental quality has developed a nice webcam air quality monitoring system.  The large clear images give you a good idea of the clear desert air on good days.   The huge panorama is a great view of the city.     Locally the University of Arizona has another excellent webcam of the campus and view. 

Arizona webcams on Livelook

The City of Port Townsend Washington has an exceptional webcam mounted high atop the fire station radio antenna. On a clear day the cam has views of the Olympic Peninsula, Mount Baker, Port Townsend Bay and the Admiralty Inlet. The cam is user controllable with pan/tilt controls and presets of landmarks. The view is worth checking out and is now an award winner from Livelook. More about Port Townsend from Wikipedia.

Other webcams near Port Townsend on the Livelook map search page.

Do you like Sunsets? What if you could see live views of the setting sun as it makes it’s way around the world? With Livelook Sunset Cams now you can! Livelook Sunset Cams dynamically searches the Livelook database of webcams and displays all cams that are within minutes of sunset.

I’ve found it’s pretty entertaining to watch the sunset move around the globe. Just check back to sunset cams every fifteen minutes and there will always be something new.

Depending on the time of year you can get a great variety of sunset locations. The sun might be setting in Minnesota at the same time it’s going down in Brazil. This concept is easy to see with the map results button on the page. It plots the cams on the Livelook webcam map search page.

There will be some times of the day when no results will appear. You can click the Map results button to see where the sun is setting at that time. And if you know of any webcams missing on some remote Pacific Island please be the first to upload a new cam for that location! I still wish for an Easter Island webcam.

You may see some cams where the image does not display. Often those are streaming cams or cams where the image is not accessible. Please give the webcam owners some love and click the title or image thumbnail to go to their website and see the full size image.

If you like the Sunset Cams page you can click the email results button to send the URL to a friend. You can also click the options link under each cam to add one to your My Livelook page or email the URL to a friend. This feature is could still be improved so please make comments here or drop us a line at our contact form.

A sample of some of the beautiful sunset images found through the sunset cams page:

St. Paul Hazecam

Intercontinental Tahiti Resort - Great webcam!