A window to another world

21st July, 2013

Imagine a window into another world, in your living room. Or your office, your bar, your barbershop, your bathroom.

A live, high-definition, always-on window to the Amazon rainforest, or Times square, or Tahir square, or your town centre, or your New York office. A part of the furniture, a part of your awareness.

The minimum requirements:

  1. HD video.
  2. High quality streaming - no freezing, no jittering.
  3. The receiving screen should be fixed and always on - hanging there like a living painting.

To start making it happen, you'd need to be able to mount a camera somewhere interesting or beautiful, dynamically compress HD video, and have the ability to stream a lot of it. Seems doable, could build an MVP reasonably cheaply.

Justin.tv has some fun examples - but high-quality, always-on, uninterrupted streaming would be something else entirely.

Edit 2013/9/18:

In the longer-term, window-feeds could be set up by anyone who can supply an HD quality feed. Business is in compressing and distributing feeds.

In the shorter-term, would need to bootstrap by producing feeds.

Limiting factor is bandwidth, both upstream for the feed producers, and downstream for the feed consumers. Bandwidth will continually get cheaper until someday soon this business will be viable.