Fox News Chicago picked a heck of a day to launch
its cool news Web site LiveNewsCameras.com. As the site launched, snowstorms and other severe weather threatened several parts of the country, Super Tuesday news was starting to come in, and the Dow dropped 300 points. And you could watch video of all that on one site.
This site is a collection of live feeds from Fox affiliates all over the country. It has dreams of expanding to other video sources.
Watching this site is like being in a television newsroom, with satellite feeds flying at you from all over the globe. Now anybody can experience that. I do like the fact that LiveNewsCameras has a live moderator to guide users to the most interesting stuff coming in on the feeds.
The site
explains:
A group of us here at Fox News Chicago had a big idea -- to let you see news the way we see it.
Every day hundreds of live events take place around the world, and while you only see a few of them on our newscast, many are available to watch live on the Internet as they are happening...
The idea behind this page is simple -- to bring together the resources of Fox and other broadcasters around the world, and make it easy to find live streaming video to watch on your computer.
As of today, there are more than 50 channels of live streaming video for you to watch on this page -- that number will certainly grow over time.
Over the years, various sites have tried this. CNN.com, for example, offered a subscription-based service called Pipeline
that eventually turned free.
I like the idea in the abstract, but I have...