JenniCAM
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Jennifer Ringley started JenniCAM in 1996. She was the first lifecaster to stream her life 24/7 and can be considered the woman who inspired “Reality TV.” In 2003, CNN quoted her saying, “I keep JenniCam alive not because I want or need to be watched, but because I simply don’t mind being watched.” The site disappeared that year along with Jenni’s internet identity, but she will always be remembered for the groundbreaking work she did on JenniCAM.
iTunes
Miro
RSS
A good historical summary of Jennicam. However, “An American Family” (1973) is usually cited as the springboard for reality TV, followed by NBC’s “I Witness Video” (1991-94) which featured Lee Tepley’s unforgettable underwater footage of Lisa Costello pulled toward the ocean bottom by a pilot whale.
Lisa: “It’s hard to describe; I just felt this love for this whale. The whale was touching and kind of [can't understand this word], so I started like caressing it and massaging it and was really enjoying it, and it was pretty apparent that he was enjoying it. We were just liking each other. Then I stopped. I thought, ‘Well, you know, I don’t want to overdo my stay.’ And so I just kind of pulled away and was looking at him. About twenty or thirty seconds later he went down and came back up, and then we had eye contact again. We were kind of staring at each other. The next thing I know he charged at me.”
Great report on this piece of Internet history : D
(Nick)
I’m not sure she “invented reality TV” any more than Al Gore invented the Internet, but she definitely was a pioneer of lifecasting.
Let me try the picture-comment feature with this random pix of JenniCAM :
Feel free to remove it : D
Let me try the picture-comment feature with this random pix of JenniCAM :
Feel free to remove it : D
Hey @BrookersTV from youtube I just tried to post a video comment and it didn’t accept my html. odd. I’m going to try to fix that asap! I hope your lovely picture comes through!!
JenniCAM is very similar to justintv and may be how he got his idea?
@techman, probably.
For now here is my video comment: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TJYE55ERdp8
Thanks for doing a Jenni tribute. I was a big fan of Jenni from it’s very start … my Linux co workers had discovered her and it was an icon on our work/home desktops. (I never paid for the undressed Jenni). Back then (10 years ago) family and coworkers (not us geeks) didn’t realize what the icon represented.
JenniCAM certainly was big at the time, i remember discovering it in about 1999 but only has dial up back then :(
I never saw jenni at the time (maybe because of the time difference with me being in the UK) and just thought maybe the image was static
One final thought; at the time of JenniCAM i wanted to see if it was possible for me to stream video over the internet, but you need to have all sorts like a streaming server and various software, It amazes me now that we can just use a FREE service like JTV, ustream or the yahoo service (i forget the name now) with no fuss just sign up and log in and you can stream to 1000’s of people, i wonder where we will be in another 10 years
Thanks for the good comments mike and luke! Someone on YouTube made a good comment that I want to republish here to see what you think:
in 1979 Albert Brooks wrote and directed a movie called Real Life,..it was about a filmaker who follows a family around with cameras and films every aspect of they’re lives,…the movie sucked but it was definatly ahead of it’s time as far as all the shitty reality shows they put on T.V…….i’m just full of useless facts.
By nickygentz
@BrookersTV- video embeds are working now!
There are women lifecasters like Jenni. Nekomimi Lisa was lifecasting back when Jenni was and she still does it today on Ustream and Justin.tv.
I met up with Lisa for lunch. She had her webcam and I had mine. She talked about how the server was too expensive for her to get big back in the day. Now she doesn’t have to worry about that.
Great show!
Hey thanks!
REAL LIFE (1979), Albert Brooks’ first feature, was a spoof of PBS’ AN AMERICAN FAMILY (1973). about the Loud family by Alan and Susan Raymond, who also made the sequels: AN AMERICAN FAMILY REVISITED (1983) and LANCE LOUD!: A DEATH IN AN AMERICAN FAMILY (2003). I wouldn’t say that REAL LIFE “sucked”; it was co-scripted by Brooks with Harry Shearer and Monica Johnson (co-writer on most of Brooks’ films). There are fresh and funny scenes in all of his movies, especially LOST IN AMERICA (1985) and MOTHER (1996). (Both won best screenplay awards from the National Society of Film Critics.)
Man that pizza looks soooooo friggen yummy!
Nothing like New York pizza, ey?
Um, Did you say “Who is the modern day Jenny Ringwald?” Did Jenni Ringley change her name, and you slipped it out? Or was that just a verbal typo (a speako?) in your video comment above, Sarah?
I LOVED the tribute to JenniCam. Never got into JenniCam in its day, but definitely checked it out.
Hey Chris, the 3g signal sometimes cuts out. arg. I guess it’s not easy to understand. I meant “who is the modern day Jenni?”
Let me know! Thanks!
Great show! Really enjoyed this one in particular
:-)
Hey Sarah,
Do you have a blog about “Internet Society and Culture”?
I saw the blog post that calls you the Perez Hilton of the online world. Hahaha! I guess Weezer makes internet fame something to seek these days.
In the day of Jenni it was so new that she had little competition. Now it’s hard to get anyone to watch your video.
What will this “society” be like in 5 years?
Probably similar to how it is now. I don’t know how to answer that really.
[...] up on your internet history. Pop17 looks back on JenniCam, the ’90s webcam precursor to all the shameless exhibitionism that’s become commonplace [...]
I still have a lot of old JenniCam images preserved on CD. She disappointed me however, when she stole another cam girls boyfriend, can’t remember the names, but the other camgirls boyfriend looked like an unwashed hippie!
@Albert can you host these images anywhere, so you can share them with us all.
I was never a massive jenny cam person and would love to see what I missed
How do I download, how do I get any footage of old reality TV programs, beginning with An American Family. I am a media researcher, Iris
Tel-Aviv
Iris: To purchase Alan and Susan Raymond films, including AN AMERICAN FAMILY REVISITED, go to their site: http://www.videoverite.tv/pages/cart.html