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free streaming services
Saturday, October 7 2000
Kim (Bathtubgirl) and Maria (Dirtygirl) picked me up at around noon and we headed back to their place in Venice for another of my "sessions" working on the studio and the Bathtubgirl.com website. On the way we stopped at Best Buy for some essential equipment: speakers, a network hub, a microphone. There were plenty of discounted "open items" - the trick, however, was making sure that when they were rung up by the cashier, we were actually charged the discounted price. (If I hadn't been paying attention, Kim would have paid $40 too much.)
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I had a spectacular success with the first tricky job I undertook at back at Kim's place. She was having trouble with the quality of the audio coming from the webcam above her bathtub, so I decided to attach a remote microphone to the camera and bypass the built-in mike. There's no jack for such a microphone in the Logitech webcam, so I was going to have to do a little warranty violating. I removed the single Phillips screw, opened the eyeball-shaped device, and figured out where the microphone was attached. I removed the existing microphone leads and replaced them with leads to another mike attached to a 10 foot wire. When I put the thing back together, not only did it work, but so did the remote microphone! For once, when things had an opportunity to go wrong, they sat on their hands and let the good things happen.
I had less luck with Spotlife.com, Kim's streaming media provider, which provided a limited free service that came with the webcam. I know, I know, you get what you pay for, but already, just while fucking around, Kim had managed to use up all of her free streaming minutes. I searched the web in vain trying to find an alternative streaming service, but all I could find were webcam "providers," a service any fool can get for himself with standard FTP access. So Kim had to end up plunking down $50 a month on "premium" service.
Neither of us are very happy with Spotlife.com. Its front page is a nauseating display of adorable children doing the sorts of things pedophiles like to wack off about, and its terms of use forbids nudity (while inexplicably allowing users to classify their streams as "adult"). Additionally, the site suffers frequent "net congestion" issues and doesn't stream images any larger than 160 pixels in width. Since there don't appear to be any alternatives, I guess the situation is that streaming media on the web is too recent of a phenomenon for it to have attracted much free (ie, investor-funded, money-losing) support. Of course, streaming media also requires substantial infrastucture. A streaming webcast doesn't have to be all that popular before it requires a T3 line for distribution.
Kim invited me to a party she'd be attending tonight in Culver City with the guy Chris from the camera store. But from the way she described it, it sounded like it was going to be one of those awful affairs where no one wants to talk to you if you're wearing the wrong shoes. Besides, I wanted to work on some of my own projects, so I declined.
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