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Danny - Give Us A Webcam!
Max sent me a link to Shack Watchers, which is a social photblogging service designed to let people know how long the line is at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in NYC, about three blocks from our office.
It's a really great idea, but an even better idea would be for Danny Meyer, the genius behind the Shake Shack, Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and a number of other top restaurants in NYC, to put up a realtime webcam somewhere on the roof of the Shake Shack and put the video up on the Shake Shack website.
I am not an expert in such things, but I bet it wouldn't cost more than a couple thousand bucks to do it and the goodwill they'd get from the community would be enormous.
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Posted April 16, 2006 in Random PostsComments
mmmmmm Shake Shack - not on the Crestor Achievers diet Im afraid....
Posted by: jackson | Apr 16, 2006 10:02:02 PM
The issue with real time web cam is not the set up cost, rather the cost of bandwidth to provision for peak concurrent users connecting to a stream.
To accommodate needs of users connecting with dial up and broad band they would need at the minimum of two streams 32Kbps and 128 kbps.
Assuming they want to support 15 concurrent users on each stream the total bandwidth requirements would be
128Kbps * 15 + 32 Kbps * 15 = 2400 Kbps upload band width . This would require 3 DSL lines so approx 1000/ month recurring bandwidth costs.
If fault tolerance is not desired a single box deployment will do.
If fault tolerance is required, 3 boxes will be needed. 2 Identical encoding boxes and one for the house keeping. Third box can be eliminated if they have spare ports on a layer 4 switch.
For streaming server they can chose from Windows media server, Helix, Darwin.
Posted by: Lalit Sarna | Apr 17, 2006 5:14:34 PM
And I'm betting this is the reason the web cam isn't up yet--because they asked some 'professional' who said something like this--which is, of course, completely ridiculous.
We don't need a live video feed, all we need is a low resolution pic updated every minute or so. This supports a couple hundred users simultaneously off of a single DSL line.
Posted by: Brannon | May 22, 2006 7:03:33 PM
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