WeAll… love to watch webcams!
…and WeAll will watch webcams. A key difference between the webcam solution that we have built and what many internet users are familiar with is what we call the “hub and spoke model” or “many to many solution”, dont get scared its really quiet easy. You see most of the more publicized webcam solutions are “peer to peer solutions” meaning that they work great if I want to connect to another person or a couple of people, all the technology has to do is put my computer in touch with your computer and we are off and running. By using my internet connection and the internet connection of the person I am webcam-ing with we can successfully chat, its a great way to put 2 or a small handful of people in touch with each other… problems arise when you want more then a handful of people, you can imagine if I have my webcam on and 20 people want to watch it, all of those 20 people are fighting to connect to my computer and before you know it my system is locked up and its total chaos, it just wont work. So to get around this problem we have designed our own model, a model that theoretically allows an unlimited number of people to watch the same webcam (this has been proven time and time again with up to about 15,000 viewers). Cool. How?What we here at WeAll.com do is just as simple but without putting any unnecessary strain on your computer and internet connection. When I decide to use my webcam, my stream (delivery of live webcam image) is directed to the WeAll.com servers, so if someone wants to watch they go and get the stream from there (so there is no direct communication between individual computers), this then allows “theoretically unlimited” people to watch the same webcam. Its dead easy, and its key to the continued success of a true community for the masses.
“If its that easy then why doesn’t everyone do it?” (I hear you ask) They can, however Providing the server infrastructure to allow this has taken a lot of time and money to set up, and the overheads of delivering all of this content is an added cost that many businesses do not want to take on. We believe this is a core aspect of our business model and will continue to provide this “many to many” solution for as long as WeAll enjoy it.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
An interesting article that one. The solution you have is unique, and does cost $$$ on bandwidth and needs massive hardware investment, but serves well when one cam is particularly popular (which is usually the case!). The advantage of direct connections is that they can allow decent framerates and audio between the two machines - high framerates are well loved by viewers. What about a hybrid where clients interact directly normally but when the popular client detects a high number of connections it starts feeding the video to the main server for further connections? Feasible but complicated, but saves expanding the large server room you must have at the moment.
Thanks for posting that one there.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Will the new site have streaming web cam quality that is now becoming common on many video chat sites and will sound be available?
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Faster, better quality Webcam Streams and Audio are what we will continue to strive for, as time goes on the restraints surrounding our goals become less and less. We will continue to do our best on receiving maximum quality from broadcasters and deliver the content to a viewer as quick as possible. At this stage we will continue to develop our “hub and spoke model” and not develop specifically for a “peer to peer” solution, as this is what the community is accustom to.