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Wednesday, Oct 8, 2008
In Garland Simon's future, everyone and everything will be on camera, all the time.
Oct 2, 2000 | Garland P. Simon dreams of a world filled with cameras. Bedrooms, kitchens, traffic, tropical hurricanes, arctic snows, Super Bowl parties, wars, kennels -- she'd like lenses pointed at them all, the images filmed and broadcast over the Internet to the entire world.
But she's not yet another Orwellian Big Brother or some kind of Kafkaesque new-economy control freak. She's simply the 44-year-old, drawling CEO of Cammunity.com. Back in 1998, Cammunity was little more than an underdeveloped video search engine that returned plenty of pornography in its results. But since Simon took over in August of 1999, Cammunity.com has grown into a 16-person, venture-funded business -- a network of 10,000 smut-free webcams, filming everything from traffic at the George Washington Bridge to the pandas at the Atlanta zoo.
Simon, a former executive at ABC Sports and USA Networks, wants to harness the power of all these mechanical, online eyes and plans to vastly increase the size of her webcam network. In the long run, she hopes to build a democratic media giant that earns a sizable profit while offering a viable alternative to the calculated and saccharine top-down offerings of traditional media giants like Disney.
So far, the Atlanta company only draws about 200,000 unique visitors each month. Meanwhile, the market for reality-based content seems to be shrinking, judging by CBS's recent cancellation of "Big Brother." There's also the nagging problem that the most popular webcams on the Net aren't aimed at nature scenes, which is what Simon prefers to watch. Instead, they focus on shallow exhibitionists like DotComGuy and Jennifer Ringley of JenniCam fame.
Nonetheless, Simon welcomes the challenge to revolutionize the webcam, build a business -- and alter what we watch on the Net.
Why would someone come to Cammunity.cam when shows like "Big Brother" are turning away viewers in droves? Isn't the public tiring of "real-world" programming?
No. It's a matter of how the television converts 24-hour programming into something that's entertaining to watch for an hour. I watched both "Survivor" and "Big Brother" and while I liked "Survivor," "Big Brother" was pretty dull. They tried to make it exciting and failed. But that's what television requires -- an hour or so of programming. Reality content on the Internet is different. With the Internet, people can drill down and return multiple times. For example, one of our partners is Africam in South Africa, which places cameras all over the watering holes in the country's national parks. They get a lot of traffic throughout the day, much of it coming through us. And that's what we think works on the Net -- niches.
Can you make money, though, with hundreds or thousands of niches? What's the business model?
When we acquired the site, the business model treated Cammunity as a search engine for people who were looking for video or webcams on the Internet. But we really believed we could move the business forward. So today, we've taken the group of webcam producers and the best of the content they are producing and we've started syndicating that content to other sites that need to enhance their text-based sites with video. For instance, we've got a lot of producers who are doing weather and traffic-related images on a daily basis and those kinds of images can only help sites that are targeted toward those areas, like Weather.com. So that model of content syndication is a very important part of our business model.
Where is your content being picked up?
Discovery.com, for example, is a group that we've been doing some business with. We've also been talking to groups that are developing Web yellow page directories, pointing out to them that live images will enhance their service -- especially with restaurants. People can go online and see if the restaurant is crowded or who's there. And if they can't get there, they can certainly see what their friends are doing. We have done a lot of events in the past -- specifically around the Super Bowl -- where we had webcams in competing bars in St. Louis and Tennessee last year
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