Sam Hill: Online WebCam (Housespotting) [Back to Home]

Sam Hill: Online Webcam Ok, confession time. The webcam hasn't been online since June 2003 and I can't be bothered to set it back up and switch it online again. now, i'm older I prefer not to be spied on 24/7 any more and hey, Big Brother does it so much better (and more interestingly) these days. Historically, however the webcam site Housespotting was the bigone. Setup in January 1998 by myself and David Symons to show student life 24/7 from our little student house in Reading, Berkshire (where we were students at Reading University). Being the first of its kind to fully show students 24/7 it turned out to be incredbily popular even in the basic crude days of webcam technology back then. Due to bandwidth limitations the best that could be achieved was updates from the ccamers every 15 seconds; its amazing how much happened during those 14 seconds the cameras didn't capture. The whole thing was achieved using a variety of commercial webcams (made by Creative Labs), and camcorders plugged into ATI All-in-wonder graphics cards. The connections up to the Internet was manged via a network built around our house and powered from 3 Windows 98 based computers and an old IBM-PS2 running RedHat Linux operating as the file server holding it all together. It was quite suprising it all worked really. But anyway... If you are wondering where the name came from, the big film of the time was Trainspotting and Housespotting was a good pun on that film. Housespotting (through the ages) - history of the original webcam website Best of photos - a selection from the millions captured by the cameras over their 30 months of operation. [Back...] If you wish to contact me - send an email to sam@ this website's URL All website contents © Copyright 1997-2004 Sam Hill. All rights reserved.