Back in the early days of the internet, there were a bunch of webcams anyone could view - sometimes a street, sometimes the coffee machine of a lab, and, occasionally, someone’s bedroom or appartment. Although they were much talked about, I’m sure it was a tiny number of people, and probably not for very long. And because of crappy bandwidth, most of these cams were more like constantly updating image, rather than actual video. Tbh, maybe it’s not even a real thing, but I definitely remember it being spoken about.
Nowadays obviously things are great for people who want strangers to know what they’re up to, they’ve got countless media to choose from. And ‘watching a stranger do mundane things’ was packaged up and sold as reality TV a long time ago.
But I guess my question is, are there people still live-streaming their life - without it being a sex thing (like onlyfans) or advertising / shilling front (so, ruling out most ‘influencers’). Are their folks out there just running a 24h twitch channel where people can watch them fold their laundry or doomscroll the night away on a poorly illuminated couch?
Wasn’t it security issues? I thought those people didn’t know their stream were publicly accessible?
This was more likely. I seem to remember people passing around IPs on IRC then AIM chatrooms of webcams from all over that were accessible from a browser, but I’m fairly certain the owners had no idea they were open to the internet. This must’ve been late 90s/early 00s.
Those still exist. You can still find some using a search-engine.
insecam.org is one, although they intentionally remove indoor webcams.
Ah! That would make more sense!
Edit: did a bit of research, and there were defintely some intentional live streamers, but maybe aiside from those couple of people, the rest were just a reminder of the importance of ip security.