Meet the Filmmaker Who Is Installing Live Cams All Over the World

[sman]

Meet the Filmmaker Who Is Installing Live Cams All Over the World

https://mashable.com/2014/06/25/explore-live-cameras/?europe=true

"Right now, as we're speaking, I’m looking at hippos at a watering hole in Africa," Charles Annenberg Weingarten says with a mix of salesmanship and genuine wonder. "Waves are breaking at Pipeline Beach."

Weingarten isn't standing near any hippos in Africa nor is he dipping his toes in the sand at the beach. He's sitting on a green couch in a converted apartment in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by six barking dogs. In front of him, there's a screen showing just a few of the many live camera feeds he has helped to install around the world. Cameras are streaming footage of brown bears waiting patiently for salmon in Alaska, stingrays gliding past coral in the UK, closeups of honey bee colonies buzzing inside their hive in Germany, and yes, animals gathered around a remote watering hole in Kenya.

Explore, the organization Weingarten started, has installed more than 75 high-definition cameras in parks and facilities on four continents since 2011 with plans to expand to at least one other continent in the near future. He expects to have as many as 150 cameras on the ground in the next year.

The group is approaching 100 million hours of footage streamed online and its website, Explore.org, now gets about 30 million page views a month from just under one million visitors. Its reach would be significantly larger if you factored in all the outlets that carry the feeds, including Animal Planet, CNN and ABC News.

For Weingarten, who describes himself as a thinker, entrepreneur, philanthropist and filmmaker, among other lofty titles, the goal isn't necessarily to build a media empire, and it's certainly not to lay the groundwork for Big Brother. 

The goal is to use technology as a gateway to nature rather than a barrier to it.