"Live News Cameras" online

A former colleague of mine in the Bay Area, Andrew Finlayson, (he's ND at Fox in Chicago now) pinged me tonight to let me know about a beta site they threw together just in the last 3 weeks.

http://www.livenewscameras.com/

It's basically a page with live streams from all their Fox TV video feeds around the country... and in the upper right he's got one staffer with a simple webcam sitting at her computer screen telling anyone who is watching which stream is 'hot' right now. She just called out to us that if we clicked on the Washington 2 feed, for instance, we'd see Hillary right now as she comes out to talk live. And I did, and I watched Hillary's speech in a window in the middle.

This is a terrific concept. Here's how Andrew described it for me:

We are aggregating all the live feeds we can get on this day. We think of this as an experiment on many levels. Is the platform stable, will the audience like it, will they come back, does unfiltered news work, can we help moderate it with a light hand, can we find more news sources to point to, does the concept expand, what does it say about democracy and the future of journalism if we can start streaming every kind of news event…politics, weather, business, etc.

A colleague did most of the programming, we sort of glued together different ideas and we thought Super Tuesday would be the perfect day to try it out.

And they did it in 3 weeks.