For the past 6 years, I've been working with David Hancock and the Hancock Wildlife Foundation to create and publish live camera streams from wildlife locations, especially bald eagle nests here in the Vancouver and surrounding area.

Over this time I've been asked over and over how we do many of the things we do. Two years ago I started to write things down in what I hoped would be something that could be turned into a book - especially since David's Hancock House Publishers would have published it. 

Time passed and the book got longer and in some ways harder to write because I kept having to go back and change things as the technology changed. Not long ago I pretty much abandoned the idea that it should be a book, and decided to put it up on a web domain that I'd purchased a while back for another purpose that never got off the ground. Last week I put the finishing touches (for now) on the last of the 25 articles/chapters and turned on access to the site at www.Now-Pages.com.

I've decided that the best way to do this in such a changing world is to use the internet the way it should be used - as a collaborative vehicle where any/all may learn and hopefully contribute too. There is a discussion forum with some generic topics as well as the ability to comment on the individual chapters.

I'll be teaching a course to a group of grade-school kids this summer on creating a wildlife camera stream, and the articles will be used as some of the course materials. I'm hoping the kids will use the forum to continue to learn and interact after the course as they disappear to their respective homes and vacation venues as they'll have the tools to do all manner of interesting wildlife streams.

The following is the dedication, preface and table of contents from my forthcoming e-book on doing live internet wildlife video streaming. The book is written and I'm in the midst of getting the pictures and illustrations in order. The industry is still shaking out, and there are ongoing changes that I'll be dealing with both here, on the web and in subsequent updates to the book. Watch for publication announcements both here and on the Hancock Wildlife Foundation web site. HWF will receive proceeds from the sale of the book. $14.95 (US or Canada - currencies are effectively at par)

The Amateur (and Professional) Live Wildlife Streamer

Secrets of the professional Live Wildlife Streamers

In late 2005, David Hancock, a noted biologist and conservationist in the Vancouver area, phoned me from Hornby Island, B.C. He had just seen some video captured from a camera situated right beside an eagle nest, 100 feet in the air – and wanted to know if there was any chance we could hook this camera up to the internet.

Hornby Island is not the remotest place in B.C. by any means – but it is 2 ferry rides from Vancouver Island (3 rides from Vancouver, where I live) and about as out of the way as you can get and still get there by car. The first question I had was “is there internet on the island?” and as it turns out, there is. The B.C. Government paid the local phone company (Telus) copious dollars to ensure that each school in the province was hooked up to the internet, and at the same time, Telus took the opportunity to put in a facility in some of the communities to hook up homes within the local area to the net as well, including those around the school on Hornby Island. It turned out the nest was within the maximum 3.5 Km distance (by phone lines) from the telephone equipment, and soon we had the nest camera streaming live to some selected friends.

Shortly after that, the friends told some of their friends, who told some of their friends, and soon the world was watching this pair of eagles sitting on their eggs, waiting for them to hatch. This was the beginning of what has turned out to be a new industry, that of providing live, real-time and long-term streaming video from all manner of subjects. From pet dogs to spiders to fish and of course many different birds and other wild beasts, the world has been watching from their desktop into the bedrooms and maternity wards of Mother Nature.

Along the way I’ve had to deal with several aspects of video streaming that at first seemed pretty common-place but which have ended up being anything but. These range from weatherproofing cameras and microphones to running power and internet into some pretty strange places, and then dealing with having to pay for the network bandwidth and costs associated with having attracted literally millions of people to watch our streams.

This e-book gives you the benefit of my and my associates’ trial and error learning about these technologies and should give you a pretty good leg-up on getting your live streams working in the best way possible. Who knows – maybe your site will be the next hot-video site.

Richard 

The live streaming video industry is still in its infancy. As of today, October 1, 2010, Zaplive.TV has stopped its free service.

This has affected a number of us in the live streaming wildlife video business as we've been using Zaplive, either directly or via their customer WildEarth.TV to offset the bandwidth costs of our live streams.

It's only in the past couple of years that such a free (advertising supported) service has even been available. I'm sure this won't be the last such change; the industry is just in its infancy.

First, a bit of background. Live, long-term video streaming is not like any other video service on the internet. All the others are what I call "episodic" video. They have a definite beginning and end, even if they are of a live performance. A rock concert does not go on for day on end (at least not often, like Woodstock) and certainly not for months on end. Same thing for a hockey game or football game, and of course the typical YouTube video is 10 minutes or less. Movies run up to around 3 hours, and so it goes.

Even things like traffic cameras and many of the other publicly viewable live cameras are different from the likes of Hancock Wildlife Foundation's eagle nest cameras in that they typically don't allow unlimited numbers of viewers and so have fixed costs, typically in the form of a single outbound ISP connection that handles all views.

No, nothing except the live, single subject cameras of high interest such as the eagle nests, bear dens, and other "net-vicarious" life viewing cameras have the problems associated with enabling and monetizing long-term videos to large numbers of people; people who demand that their access be long-term and unimpeded by technical or economic considerations.

This has been and continues to be the type of video that is stressful to fulfill. It has brought at least 2 companies I know of to their knees. It has been an ongoing problem for me and Hancock Wildlife Foundation. It isn't getting easier quickly, but it is getting easier somewhat.

Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel (DC) is not my cup of tea. There are lots of other things to wile my time away with, but some people love it.

There are fan sites on the net all over the world - but one in particular seems to have drawn the ire of the DC lawyers and he's about to cave in and give them his web domain.

The fact is he's got www.deadliestcatchtv.com but that's not it completely. His site includes links to YouTube postings by the DC people such as show excerpts, etc. Stuff that you and others might link into our own blogs via the "embed" code provided by YouTube for their videos.

He also has information that the DC people have sent him directly - and presumably want him to post because it boosts the show's ratings.

The problem is, the DC lawyers have gotten into the act and they just don't seem to understand the internet at all. They think that this site owner has done something wrong in showing the YouTube embed code on his site (remember, the video still comes from YouTube - it just shows up through a window on his site)

It's not like he's copied the video and hosted it on his own hardware - that would be both against the law and silly.

It's not that he's edited it and made a collage of it (legal in the US but not in Canada under Fair Use/Fair Dealing - at least until Bill C-32 comes to pass)

It's not that he's the only one with a domain name that is similar to the show's name, he's not - in fact the show does not even have "deadliestcatch.com"

What the legal-beagles don't seem to understand is that such fan sites as this are what make a show work today. They are what help keep people interested and in fact do the show a major service in many ways.

One of the major ways these fan sites help the show is that they support fans that a legitimate site might not appreciate. Fans come in all shapes and size and temperaments. I know, I help look after a "kid friendly" set of sites, and some of the people we've attracted really need to be somewhere else away from the kids. Same thing goes when you're a fairly family-oriented channel like DC - you have a show like Deadliest Catch that attracts some of the more adventurous, and of course likely weird and hence likely to be disruptive to the "normal" people the site might attract, it sure would be nice if they went elsewhere but still supported you...

Anyway - 'nuff said. IMHO they (the lawyers) 're idiots.

Personally this puts a big black mark against Discovery Channel in my book.

richard

This isn't really about Videon on the internet - but it is about digital TV and the fact that here in Canada the government is dropping the ball in telling people, especially out in rural Canada, that their old "analog" TVs won't work come next August 31, 2011 unless they get a digital channel converter box.

If you get your TV signals from a cable company or satellite company you're fine. Their equipment is already digital and you don't have an antenna on your roof or rabbit-ears on your set top.

To those of you who have an antenna (and I see them all over, even here in Vancouver) you're in for a big surprise come September 1 next year. You won't be able to see TV at all because not only are the Canadian channels all switching, those in the US have already switched.

In the US, the government subsidized the purchase of the converter boxes - why shouldn't they, they stand to make billions from selling off the freed-up frequency spectrum to wireless phone and service carriers?

The Canadian government on the other hand has neither stepped up with a subsidy, nor even told you much about this change - they've been mute except for some pretty well stifled stuff from the CRTC chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein.

If you have an antenna on your roof you should be looking into getting a converter - and you should be giving your MP heck for the complete lack of preparation they've foisted on the unsuspecting public.

On the other hand, maybe this is about Video on the Internet - if you have to purchase a converter box anyway, why not go whole-hog and get one of the ones that gives you access to stuff from around the world? Just Google "internet TV set top box" and you'll see what I mean. Netflix is coming to Canada and their box is only $99 (US, but...)

Take a look at this site to see some of the various other boxes available too

Should be interesting - the local stations are going to scream - but then they should be selling you converters!

richard

Google I/O is on at the moment, and I'm just catching up after watching initial Keynote and wandering around looking at some of the new products and facilities announced today.

The major item is the absolutely fantastic announcement of Google's opening of their recently acquired VP8 video codec and the establishment of the WebM open media project.

The blow this will deal to H.264 will hopefully be fatal as this proprietary codec has the power to stifle the web every bit as much as it has empowered it to bring you the millions of videos of recent years. I mean - did you realize that with essentially no exceptions, every single use of H.264, whether through a paid license for your camera or application, or their "free" license for creating/viewing on the web, you, the end user of those cameras and video editing/creation suites cannot use the resulting images commercially without breaking the terms of the license and being open to law suit by MPG LA, the patent holder group. You can't sell your photos/videos! You can't advertise beside them! You certainly can't create advertisements with them!

Many of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one. Will the (US) government step in and rule that this is restraint of trade? Or will MPEG LA start suing their "customers" like the RIAA and MPAA are doing?

Of course the fact that Adobe is going to put the VP8 inside Flash will help, but they really should simply concentrate on making HTML5 with WebM video their default standard for all new web creation software.

Shortly after installing my new version of Windows 7 Professional, I decided to take a look at the Zaplive.TV free publisher program. Hancock Wildlife Foundation has been using Zaplive's distribution via an agreement with WildEarth.TV for over a year now, but we've pretty much been doing straight Adobe media encoder live streams.

Now we're gearing up to do some live annotations by David Hancock of not only our regular streams, but of other streams as well, including some generated at the Hancock Ranch in South Surrey, near Vancouver.

We're likely to go with VidBlaster's offering since we're going to be using multiple cameras and sources, but I wanted to take a look to see how close the various offerings are to Vidblaster in terms of features and quality options. At this time I'm comparing free to free - since I'm using the Vidblaster demo which puts their logo in the upper right corner of the outbound stream.

The live streaming video industry is only just over a year old; at least the part that will monetize your stream (or at least mean you don't have to pay for bandwidth) for you is. I've been watching and participating in it for almost 6 years now, and can say that today there are facilities that will allow almost anyone to stream almost anything - and they do stream almost anything!

In this time we've seen a number of services rise, and the offerings from them morph. As one of the pioneers (you can count the arrows in my back and chest) of this new medium I'm going to work at some subjective and objective assessments of the various services available, starting with the two I know the best: Zaplive.TV and Ustream.TV

Bear with me while I put together the criteria, and by all means climb on and comment about what you experience and your thoughts on the subject. I've just opened up the forum module and added categories for providers, hardware, software and monetizing. So far there does not seem to be anywhere else really set up to provide this kind of venue for cross-provider discussion and general information and discussion, so I'm hoping you'll join me and bring your experiences and opinions to the rest of us.