Streaming Video and Web-hits

It looks like streaming video may be out of the question in our first year of webcam operation. A very helpful lady at the University of California in Santa Cruz who runs a peregrine webcam with some great stills and video archives there has suggested that their peak data demands are as high as 90Mbps (megabits of data per second). Wow, that’s a lot. We may be able to get 8Mbps in Derby if we’re lucky, so we’ll probably won’t be able to offer this to everyone quite yet. But, then again, Santa Cruz gets millions web-hits every year for their webcams, whereas we’re estimating around 30,000 per annum. When you can watch live streaming images and take control of a camera at the same time, well, the view is incredible. This camera in a hotel in Rome gives great views, ranging from road traffic in the Basilica Maxentius to zoomed in shots of the Colosseum. Just watching the camera pan and tilt in to each selection gives us some idea of effective live streaming video can be.