Lifestreaming is an act of documenting and sharing aspects of one's daily experiences online, via a lifestream website that publishes things of a person's choosing (e.g. photos, social media, ).
However, there is a clear distinction between the act of lifestreaming as a simple form of editorial extension to one's activity stream, and the production of a well-designed lifestream which involves commitment and requires the technical skills necessary to create and maintaining its underlying site.
The increase in people keeping track of their lives Digital data is considered by futurologists a step towards artificial intelligence.
The "publish then filter" is discussed at length and breadth in . The main focus is on the fact that you can publish anything, as it may be helpful to others.
Originally being called "" or "lifestreaming," during the summer of 2007, Justin Kan's term lifecasting escalated into general usage and became the accepted label of the movement. Other labels for lifecasting and related have occasionally surfaced, including cyborglog, glog, lifeblog, lifeglob, livecasting and wearcam.
Life casting today looks a little different from the continuous stream first imagined by Mann. It has taken new forms today, such as Instagram and Snapchat, as it is the ways that modern life casters share their life experiences within the world of their social networks. Although it isn't a continuous stream, the motivations of "life sharing" remains the same.
A milestone came in 1973 on PBS when ten million PBS viewers followed the lives of the Lance Loud each week on An American Family, a documentary series often cited as the beginning of reality television. Six years later, the series was satirized by Albert Brooks in his first feature film, Real Life (1979).
Author William Gibson featured "God's Little Toy," a lifecasting mini-blimp, that followed subjects around—for their lives—in his 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties.
Jennifer Ringley's JenniCam (1996–2004) attracted mass media attention, as noted by Cnet: "JenniCam, beginning in 1996, was the first really successful 'lifecasting' attempt." Ringley appeared on talk shows and magazines covers, and her pioneering effort was followed by collegeboyslive.tv and Brian Diva Cox' MagicsWebpage.tv (1998 - 2013). That same year, the streaming of live video from the University of Toronto became a social networking phenomenon. Cyborgs Broadcast Orientation Worldwide
ZAC ADAMS Started CollegeBoysLive (1998–present) which became the first 24/7 live reality site featuring a group of unrelated gay guys living in a house together with over 56 streaming cameras and audio. Collegeboyslive chose 6 random people to live in the house and have their entire lives broadcast 24/7 for 6 months where viewers can watch and listen to them as they lived their lives. Collegeboyslive.com is currently the only live webcam house still up and operating today. collegeboyslive.com Collegeboyslive.com CollegeBoysLive was also the first website to have a movie made about one of the groups from arrival to departure. Edited by George O'Donnell the movie takes you into the life of the boys who live in such a public place
"We Live In Public" was a 24/7 Internet conceptual art experiment created by Josh Harris in December 1999. With a format similar to TV's Big Brother, Harris placed tapped telephones, microphones and 32 robotic cameras in the home he shared with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Viewers talked to Harris and Corrin in the site's chatroom. Others on camera included New York artists Alex Arcadia and Alfredo Martinez, as well as =JUDGECAL= and Shannon from pseudo.com fame. Harris launched the online live video platform, Operator 11.
DotComGuy arrived in 2000, and the following year, the Seeing-Eye-People Project combined live streaming with social networking to assist the visually challenged. After Joi Ito's Moblog (2002), web publishing from a mobile device, came Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits (2004), an experiment in digital storage of a person's lifetime, including full-text search, text/audio annotations and hyperlinks.
Over decades, Rick Kirkham shot more than 3000 hours of his video diaries, documenting his own descent from nationally syndicated broadcast journalist ( Inside Edition) to the drug and alcohol abuse that destroyed his career and family life. His footage was edited into the documentary TV Junkie (2006). OurPrisoner was a 2006 internet "reality show" which featured a man living on camera for 6 months who had to follow viewer directions to win prizes.
In 2004, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice met online and began a relationship. They decided to forgo verbal communication during the initial courtship and instead spoke to each other via written notes, sketches, video clips and MySpace. They went on to create an autobiographical film about it called Four Eyed Monsters. It was part documentary, part narrative with a few scripted elements added. They went on to produce 13 podcasts about the making of the film in order to promote it.
I moved to San Francisco so I could be closer to the rest of the team. I mean really close. The four of us lived and worked out of a small two-bedroom apartment. I spent my time becoming an expert in Linux socket programming, cellphone data networks and realtime data protocols. Four data modems in close proximity just don't work well together, so packet loss was as high as 50%. I fought with these modems for weeks but finally managed to wrestle them into a single 1.2 Mbit/s video uplink. The new camera emerged from the pile of Radio Shack parts, computer guts and hacked-up cellphones that had accumulated on my messy desk. It uses thousands of lines of Python code, a custom real-time protocol, connection load balancing and several other funky hacks.
Vogt's mobile broadcasting hardware consisted of a proprietary Linux-based computer in a box, four Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) USB networking adapters, a commercially produced analog to MPEG-4 video encoder and a large lithium-ion battery with eight hours of running time. The setup currently used is one wireless EVDO networking card and a wearable computer (laptop in a backpack) the video is streamed at ten frames per second from Kan's location using a commercial off-the-shelf product from On2. The computer takes an encoded video stream from the camera and sends it to the main website.
Kan's cryptic references to "the big rollout" became clear in the summer of 2007 when Justin.tv became a springboard for more than 60 different channels as it made its technology available to a continual flow of applicants. This included a wide variety of participants, from a Christian family and radio stations to college students, graphic designers and a Subaru repair shop. By August 2007, channels were being added at an average rate of two a day.
In September 2007, Justin.tv added a visual Directory at the top of the screen that worked in a manner similar to iTunes' Cover Flow. In that Directory one can scroll horizontally past each lifecaster and tell from the audio/video whether he or she is broadcasting, has walked away from the camera or has shut down. On September 30, 2007, reviews of channels and lifecasters began appearing on various Justin TV-related gossip blogs.
By the fall of 2007, Justin.tv had expanded to nearly 700 channels, generating 1,650 hours of daily programming, but frequent regulars stay in the forefront because hundreds of other lifecasters are on infrequently or rarely.
On October 2, 2007, Justin.tv became an open network, enabling anyone to register and broadcast his or her life. By October 13, Justin.tv had signed 3200 broadcasting accounts. Sites such as Justin.tv and Ustream.tv make it possible for anyone with a computer, a webcam, a microphone and an Internet connection to lifecast to a global audience. Some angle their camera to show themselves sitting at a computer, and they may or may not choose to communicate with viewers, either by speaking or typing in a chat area. Some leave their cameras on while they sleep. In some situations, a camera might show an empty room as the lifecaster walks around the house doing chores, totally ignoring the viewers.
As the beta testing of Justin.tv shifted to a full launch, Randall Stross examined the business aspects in The New York Times (October 14, 2007):
This month, after seven months of beta-phase broadcasting, Justin.tv formally declared that it was open for business to one and all. In its first five days, the company said, it created 18,500 hours of video and pulled in 500,000 unique visitors. What those statistics do not show is how long anyone stuck around. In a sampling I did last week during a weekday, only 44 viewers, on average, could be found at each of the eight most heavily visited channels.
Justin.tv has closed, but now runs the game streaming service twitch.tv.
Tristan Couvares is the most publicized life caster yet, Tristan teamed up with Seth Green to take life casting interactive in Control TV. They packaged the interactive media with major corporate sponsors: Ford, Sprint Nextel, and Snickers."Ford, Sprint, Snickers Get With the Crowd for 'ControlTV', AdAge.com, accessed October 26, 2010. "http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=146703. The show was streamed live 24/7, and short, re-cap episodes were posted every few days. The fans of Control TV had been dubbed "the controllers" and voted on various aspects of daily life such as what Tristan would eat, when he would wake up and what he would wear. At one point, the majority of the viewers voted for Tristan Couvares to have an hour off camera. The show had over 105 million press impressions from 31 outlets including Variety, ESPN, and CNN."NATPE's 2011 DIGITAL LUMINARY AWARDS"
Sarah Austin began her media career as a tech news producer and DJ for three years at UC Berkeley's radio station, KALX 90.7 FM, moving into video with her d7tv.com series Party Crashers which displayed her exploits crashing Silicon Valley parties. She started lifecasting in San Francisco during the spring of 2007, and when she moved to New York in August 2007 she continued to lifecast. As a video journalist, she began attending a variety of events, including the Halo 3 launch, the Ground Zero Memorial service, New York Fashion Week and Comic Book Club meetings. She sometimes chatted with her viewers while having breakfast, and more often, left the camera on as she studied her college textbooks.Lifecasting She amplified her video journalism with reports in the Sarah Meyers blog. In November 2007 she began tests of her 2008 Pop17 show, an Internet series of tech news, cyber commentary, interviews and unusual video clips.
Dylan Reichstadt, a teenager from Minnesota, started broadcasting his life in 2007. Reichstadt was featured on KARE 11 television in December 2008. He uses justin.tv and broadcasts by using his laptop, an EVDO card, his camera, and his hat for the Hat Cam.. He has multiple sponsors that help pay for costs associated to broadcasting including: Boston musician Nick Consone and Wirecast. As of today, Reichstadt has over 5,500 fans and the views on his broadcasting page are over 2 million. He has a fan page at dylanlooksgreatinties.wordpress.com.
Justin Shattuck took lifecasting to a new level in July 2007 by using a GPS unit. He picked up real estate entrepreneur, Mark Timms in Charleston, South Carolina and attempted to travel to the 48 continental states in seven days. The GPS unit made it possible for viewers to follow their exact location as a moving dot on a map. The 48/7 trip ended with exhausted Shattuck with a late night confession from a Brooklyn rooftop. Shattuck gave people rides to wherever they wanted to go, no matter how distant the destination.
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, is convinced that media creation and technological advancement are converging to technological singularity. Hence, today's development is the first step towards human's ability to "transcend its biological limitations."
Kevin Rose the co-founder of Digg, talks at length about lifestreaming and the benefits of it, such as the opportunity to organize bits of information and experience in a detailed Digital data diary. "I can see a world where eventually my children will look back at my lifestream data and say: This is Kevin's story—this is where he was on his birthday 10 years ago, and this was his favorite place to eat. Building that profile throughout your life and saving that—I think that is huge."
/ref> In total he had over 14 million viewers and users stayed on the site for an average of 27 minutes."ControlTV Reality Show Crowd Sources a Life" MediaPost Publications
Pivoting pictures: The mobile music of Jody Gnant
Less than a week after starting her broadcast, she had the No. 3 video on MySpace with 186,000 views. Her music is also being showcased as part of ScreenVison's pre-show entertainment in 4,000 movie theaters nationwide... "It's an exciting combination of interactive and non-interactive media," says Gnant. "People can choose to tune in and just watch the events of my life unfold, or they can log on and have an immediate effect on my career."
Camstreams
Qik
Future perspectives
See also
External links
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