Don Westland lets us know that the Venice Beach Cam is back up. It’s pretty awesome, and users can even control where it’s pointing! Click the image below to go check it.
Welcome to the relaunch of the World Famous Venice Beach Cam. It is now streaming live in HD video from the top of the Sidewalk Cafe. It is actually the the seventh web camera, beach weather is brutal and technology marches on.
The Beach Cam first went live in 1996 and was an instant hit on the brand new World Wide Web. Don Westland was working in a Network Test Lab in Santa Monica when he came across “Coffee Pot Cam” from the University of Cambridge. Apparently the professors setup the first web cam to monitor the coffee pot in order to know if it’s worthwhile get up and get a cup of coffee. “Coffee Pot Cam” was an Internet sensation. Westland thought people did want to really see a coffee pot, they wanted to see the beach, Venice Beach.
With no information on how to build a webcam, he experimented with cameras, an old PC and some UNIX scripts. Beach Cam went live in 1996 and was inundated by web surfers. Not much was on the web then and it seamed that everyone was visit the Beach Cam site. Since then, Venice Beach Cam has had several million happy visitors.
