It's being called "lifecasting."
Justin Kan, who coined the term, is the 23-year-old co-founder of a San Francisco-based company and the "star" of an Internet video experiment called Justin.tv. He wears a small camera mounted on a baseball cap, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the video is streamed to his website at Justin.tv.
Eating, working, talking on the phone, shopping, at parties with his friends and co-founders - the camera is always on. When Kan is asleep, the camera is mounted on a tripod pointed at his bed. He even wears it when he's going to the bathroom (although he tilts it up toward the ceiling).
Kan isn't wearing the camera because he thinks his life is all that fascinating; in fact, he freely admits that what he does most of the time isn't interesting at all. And one of the few times that things did get interesting - when Kan went back to a woman's apartment and the two wound up in the bedroom - the camera went dark, while a porn-movie soundtrack superimposed by the team back at justin.tv headquarters.
Kan and his partners didn't fit him with a hat-cam because they think he deserves to be a celebrity. They're doing it because they want to show how easy wearing a camera around all day can be. Kan says they want to create an army of lifecasters - actors, musicians, even "citizen journalists" who could follow political candidates around.
In effect, anyone who wants to wear a camera (and carry around a laptop with a wireless card) could be a star in this new genre. There was a rumour going around that actress Natalie Portman was in Silicon Valley looking for financing for a "lifecasting" project, one that would give people a glimpse behind the scenes. The actress's representatives denied the rumour.
"We've lined up a bunch of people we're really excited about," says Kan. "People who want to promote themselves online and see live video as a way to do that."
While Portman may not be signing up, Kan says he could see actors giving viewers a sneak peek behind the scenes of their working lives using a web-cam. "It doesn't have to be 24/7," he says. "This is just one example of what you can do with live video."
Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says concepts such as Justin.tv could turn out to be the future of Internet TV. He compares it to the way that conventional TV evolved in the early 1950s.
"Television had to develop an entirely new set of programming for the new medium," Thompson says. "They started out adapting radio shows, and using the same stars and so on, but they quickly had to figure out how to do it differently, because pictures added an entirely different dimension."
In the same way, the Web adds new features, such as the ability to interact with Kan, who has a chat window in which people can respond to what he's doing (including complaining when he took the camera off in his date's bedroom). Lonelygirl15, the YouTube star who turned out to be an actress, has similar interactive features on her site.
The TV era effectively began with Texaco Star Theater, starring Milton Berle, Thompson says. "It was the first big hit that kind of said okay, here's how television is going to be done, here's how it's different from radio and vaudeville." Internet TV "has not yet had its Milton Berle show," he says, but Justin.tv is the kind of thing "that could really work in this new medium."
