Reality TV is now mainstream. The Internet equivalent, voyeur sites, are suddenly catching on. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for watching non-professional actors in an incredible range of contexts.Introduction

Reality TV is now mainstream. The Internet equivalent, voyeur sites, are suddenly catching on. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for watching non-professional actors in an incredible range of contexts. Webmasters are suddenly discovering that members love live content and live performances. Members come back again and again, especially as they establish relationships with the performers. And live content provides an easy, automatic solution to the critical need for Webmasters to constantly refresh their site to keep it from going stale.

Just like the wide range of reality TV formats, there are new voyeur sites being developed every day. Some provide individual sessions. Others have these performers physically together, for example in a voyeur house. Or the performers may broadcast directly from their homes, and let members spy on intimate aspects of their lives. Unique themes and subjects can be developed to appeal to niche markets. Creativity has no limits!

But did you know that setting up and operating a voyeur site has now become as easy as setting up a chat room?

Building out a professional-looking voyeur site with live performers can be daunting, to say the least. But recently a number of factors have converged that have made this a quick, affordable and profitable proposition, even for thinly financed companies. This article provides a five-step “cookbook” that will get you up and running in no time!

The factors that suddenly render voyeur site setup so easy include:

· Huge drops in the price of hardware, including high-quality webcams, camcorders and full-featured computers;

· Widely available and affordable high-speed Internet connectivity;

· Packaged, turnkey software to manage all aspects of the streaming video/chat sessions.

Let’s now run through the steps that are necessary so you can see for yourself that voyeur sites are no longer restricted to only the largest companies.

Step 1. Design and build out your Web site.

Your site needs to be artistically pleasing and able to attract new members. You’ll need an assortment of pages, such as the usual entry/no thanks page, a home page, preview pages, and members only pages. You will want to add pages that highlight your performers, including pictures, biographies and their performance schedules. The site must allow new members to register and renew via standard, secure billing services such as iBill.

This step involves completely standard components, so an experienced adult site designer can easily pump this out. Your designer will utilize the same software that most adult Web sites use, generating a number of static html pages with a small Perl program to handle registration and billing, all running off Apache.

Step 2. Integrate the video/chat software.

The video/chat software is the portion of the site that manages the shows and streams the video. It is composed of the following three components:

· A program for the performers that they use to capture and stream the video, as well as to chat with your members. This program will allow them to specify a cam to use, and typically display an image similar to what a member will view. They will be able to view a list of members that are currently on-line, and chat to one or all of them;

· An applet for your members, which they use to view the performer and chat. An applet provides a playerless solution (read: no installation necessary), allowing you to reach the largest audience possible;

· A program that runs on a server, which manages the cam shows and which streams the video and chat messages back-and-forth between the performers and the clients. This software must be capable of handling many cams at a time, each with many members. It is a high-performance component that guarantees each user a high-quality video/chat experience.

An example of such a system is Sidekick, which is a product from our company.

The video/chat program can be either hosted directly on your server, or hosted by a service bureau, generally called an ISP. Some customers prefer professional hosting by organizations like ours to guarantee availability and reliability, to centralize responsibility, and to enhance maintainability.

Installation and setup are surprisingly simple. The biggest task is to customize two standard templates. These pages are what your member will view when he wants to join a cam show. The first page is the “Who’s Live” page, which shows the following:

· A list of all the cams, with names. A member can click on any one to watch the performance and participate;

· A thumbnail from each of the cams. This thumbnail tends to be relatively small so that all the images can be displayed on a page. The thumbnail is a recent frame from the cam. A “refresh” button allows members to update these thumbnails at any time.

The accompanying screenshot is from http://www.fraternityguys.com and illustrates how a “Who’s Live” page might appear on a live site. This site actually features twelve guys — the screenshot has been cropped for display purposes:

(Photo courtesy of http://www.fraternityguys.com)

This screenshot shows how a “Who’s Live” template might look after it has been customized.

The second page is the “Launch” page, which shows the following:

· An applet with the streaming video from the chosen performer’s cam, an optional list of all the current on-line members, and an area for text messaging. Users can add personality by entering a screen name, or by changing their text messaging color, for example;

· A thumbnail from each of the other cams. This allows the member to easily observe what is happening with all the other cams. As with the “Who’s Live” page, a “refresh” button is supported.

The server software automatically compresses the thumbnails to improve the network performance for your members, reducing page load times.

The program for the performers should provide advanced features such as the ability to kick off abusive users. Sidekick’s implementation of this feature doesn’t actually sever the abusive user’s connection; it simply stops transmitting his text messages to the performer and members.

As an aside, these voyeur programs do not include a billing component and rely on a hook-up to an external billing system as explained in Step 1. The program expects that only members — those that are paying monthly — will have access to the video streaming. If you are primarily interested in a per-per-view voyeur site, that is a different sort of application. For example, SiteBuilder from our company provides this feature.

(Stay tuned for Part Two in next week’s issue where we’ll get into hardware, cams and performers!)

Dan Finkelstein is the CEO & Founder of Nearly There Network Technologies at www.nearlythere.net and can be reached at dan@nearlythere.net.

Reality TV is now mainstream. The Internet equivalent, voyeur sites, are suddenly catching on. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for watching non-professional actors in an incredible range of contexts.Introduction

Reality TV is now mainstream. The Internet equivalent, voyeur sites, are suddenly catching on. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for watching non-professional actors in an incredible range of contexts. Webmasters are suddenly discovering that members love live content and live performances. Members come back again and again, especially as they establish relationships with the performers. And live content provides an easy, automatic solution to the critical need for Webmasters to constantly refresh their site to keep it from going stale.

Just like the wide range of reality TV formats, there are new voyeur sites being developed every day. Some provide individual sessions. Others have these performers physically together, for example in a voyeur house. Or the performers may broadcast directly from their homes, and let members spy on intimate aspects of their lives. Unique themes and subjects can be developed to appeal to niche markets. Creativity has no limits!

But did you know that setting up and operating a voyeur site has now become as easy as setting up a chat room?

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