Alright, if you haven’t had a look at the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam on ustream.tv, now is the time to have a look. AWWWWW. They are up and playing right now… and now they’re all asleep.

Lifecasting isn’t anything new. Besides Ustream, Justin.tv is a popular place for it. Heck, there’s a show called Big Brother devoted to it that has been going on for ten years, and there’s been plenty of it in the adult world. But it’s never really caught on in the mainstream, and most of the marketing around it has been contained in the realm of self-promotion, as is the case with singer-songwriter Jody Marie Gnant.

Checking out the popular streams on Justin.tv, it seems mostly like young women not saying anything while perverts say nasty things to them. Rudimentary at best.

It has to be said, there is a difference between long-term live-streaming and the occasional on and off show. It’s obvious to see how a well done, scripted half-hour web show can be effective. I’m more interested in how an unmanned, stationary camera broadcasting daily for long periods of time can garner views and generate buzz.

Puppy Cam is by far the most popular thing showing on Ustream.tv right now, getting a healthy dose of Twitter buzz and a shoutout from SAI and garnering about 1500 viewers at any one time. While that number doesn’t seem like much, the nearly 800,000 total views to date is pretty impressive.

It begs the question, besides the adult realm, how can live-streaming be used to market something or generate profit? Watching the same person all the time is tedious and weird.

I would say it might be interesting to have a booth at a club where people can go in and say/do stuff live on camera when they are drunk–or, better yet, right in the middle of a club or on a ropeline. It might be a fun way for a club to promote itself. Even having a booth where club goers upload (well screened) pictures and videos taken while enjoying their night onto the web or a screen in the club could be interesting. Of course, I’m not sure what the law is on getting consent to broadcast random people like this over the web, but there are other public cams on the net, even in a few businesses.

If anybody else has any ideas, let me know. For now, I’m going to watch the puppies chew on their toys.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 4:57 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.