53 THE LIVE LIFE IRL Streaming
IRL streaming is booming – it’s becoming a great way for businesses to boost engagement and for people to share common interests RUN FOR YOUR LIFE STREAM Words by Neal Romanek
RL stands for ‘in real life’, and IRL streaming has – in some sense – been going on since the beginning of the internet. Today,
was confined to still images, which would update several times a minute. Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam site is now the stuff of internet legend. In an era of continuous video influencer noise, it’s easy to take for granted how groundbreaking Ringley’s site was. In 1996, aged 19 and attending college in Pennsylvania, she started publishing live images from her dorm room, a single still image every three minutes, 24 hours a day. If not Ringley it would surely have been someone else, but she was the first true live cam star. Certainly, a lot of people watched JenniCam waiting for titillating moments,
IRL streaming (aka ‘life streaming’) refers to live broadcasting in an intimate, potentially confessional way, moments from one’s own life, and from any location at any time. But the origins of live streaming go back to the 1990s with live camming. The ‘cam girls’ of the early internet offered access to their private lives – not just glimpses, but 24/7 viewing – often via multiple cameras. However, with the internet running at a speed of around 56kbps, the voyeurism
IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? Jennifer Ringley’s ‘JenniCam’ revolutionised how people understood the internet could be used
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