Tag Archives: Live Webcams

Live Views of the Clinton Rally

Published in Asheville Events, Asheville Live on October 21, 2010

Preparations for the Bill Clinton Rally - Asheville NCBill Clinton will be speaking today at around 12:30 PM in an effort to drum up some more voter support for Heath Shuler in the upcoming election. Asheville Live Cam is happy to bring you live streaming views of the rally, the preparations (going on now) and the aftermath. We’ve temporarily moved the East Cam to the front page, where it will remain for the rest of the day.

From the Asheville Citizen-Times:

Clinton is stumping for U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, who faces a strong challenge from Hendersonville Republican Jeff Miller in the Nov. 2 election. Hayden Rogers, Shuler’s campaign manager, said they’ve

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Upgrades Galore!

Published in Asheville Live on March 11, 2010

Finally, we have completed some major upgrades to the AshevilleLiveCam.com website. Pardon our dust as we move into our new digs. The new site design is just the beginning! Here are just a few of the upgrades we’ve made over the past few weeks:

  • Brand new site design (obviously)
    This is more than a cosmetic change, as we’ve switched from the bug-ridden system that we had before to an all-new and easy to use publishing platform. We’re still working on converting all the pages from the previous incarnation, but they will show up in time. We’ve also got lots of new features waiting for you. NO MORE YELLOW! I actually liked the shocking yellow colors that we had before, but enough people didn’t like it that we decided to change it to more neutral blue.
  • New streaming cam viewer
    We upgraded the viewer on the old site because we were in the process of upgrading this one and it looked so FINE, that we made a “yellow” version for the old site design. The design isn’t all, though, the new viewer is much larger than the old version, for added clarity. You’re welcome!
  • Brand New North Cam
    We previously had 2 of the cool programmable Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras, one facing East and one facing West. Well, North has joined the party and is panning, tilting and zooming away as we speak! Don’t feel sorry for South Cam, it won’t be left out for long….
  • Upgraded Infrastructure
    One of the things I liked least about the old setup we had was that while it worked just fine, the quality of the streams left something to be desired. That has been addressed with some major upgrades in our infrastructure allowing us to stream the 3 PTZ cameras at a higher resolution and bitrate. All this means that those bigger video streams are clearer as well! This is in addition to the new cloud-based streaming server that we mentioned before.

Needless to say we’re super excited about the new site and the upgraded streams, but we’re not resting on our laurels here. We expect to be adding new features to the site, not the least of which is the crowd-favorite SkyCam. It needed some repairs, but we expect you to see it perched on the roof again anytime now. Now that the conversion is done, you can expect more frequent updates to the blog as well. So keep an eye on this space, because the best is yet to come!

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… And So It Begins (Again)

Published in Asheville Live on January 29, 2010

Back Yard Snow Man - Asheville NC

Well, here comes the snow again. Schools dismissed early, everyone around me has left and you can bet the grocery stores are packed and running out of milk and bread.

Hopefully, my power will stay on this time….

Right now it is pretty foggy, so there isn’t much to see when the cameras zoom, but you can see the flakes fall when it is zoomed all the way out. The fog should clear up once it really gets underway, so keep checking back for better views.

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No Video? Clear Your Cache!

Published in Asheville Live on January 28, 2010

Just a quick note to say that since we’ve moved the video streaming host offsite , we’ve had to change the Flash file that served up the video. To make things easy, we changed the way it looks, too. If you can’t see any video, check to see if you’re looking at the old file or the new file. Your browser can cache the file so it doesn’t have to download it again. The new file looks like this:

New Live Cam Viewer

The old one looks like this:

Old Live Cam Viewer

If you’re seeing the blue and white file with no video, then you need to clear your browser’s cache to get the new one. How you do this depends on your browser, but you can follow this link to figure it out:

http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser’s-Cache

It’s VERY IMPORTANT that you do not have AshevilleLiveCam.com open in a browser window or tab when you are clearing your cache. Your browser will not clear the cached files from sites that it is currently displaying.

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Bandwidth Issues (Hopefully) Resolved

Published in Asheville Live on January 28, 2010

New Design Live Cam Footer

It happens all the time. Something is happening downtown, word gets out and AshevilleLiveCam.com gets flooded with viewers attempting to get the low-down and see it for themselves. Inevitably, when that has happened, the video feeds would slow to a crawl as all the streams jockeyed for position, with some being left out in the cold without any video at all.

Rest assured, we have heard your laments and we have taken action! Streaming multiple live feeds to the internet is no easy task, and it is not inexpensive. Over the years, we’ve done everything we could to make the site more enjoyable and more reliable. I’m working on a post describing the long history of this site, in all its incarnations. Interesting reading for sure, but not very relevant here. What is relevant is the latest step we have taken to make sure every person who wants to see the live views can do so.

The real problem was lack of bandwidth. Even though we have a pretty good connection to the internet by Asheville standards, during high-traffic periods, it would simply be overwhelmed. A while back, we moved the website itself off of our own servers onto the internet “cloud” to make it more reliable, but we were still serving the internet streams from our own data center located on the top floor of the BB&T building. We resisted offloading the video streams to an external host for many reasons, price being the biggest factor.

However, a new day has dawned for AshevilleLiveCam.com as we have finally set up a streaming server on an external host, in the hopes that we can provide a better viewing experience for all our visitors, be they locals or out-of-towners. Just in time for the next batch of snow! So to all our loyal AshevilleLiveCam viewers, ENJOY!

P.S. – That’s not the only change afoot. We’re also working on an all new site design (the header image above is a little preview for you) and on bigger, better video streams including the return of everyone’s favorite SkyCam! Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for big changes.

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Bele Chere 2009 Wraps Up

Published in Asheville Events on July 26, 2009

Bele Chere 2009 - Asheville NC

Well, another year of the Bele Chere Festival has come and gone. Tomorrow the cams will all be reset to their previous positions and Asheville can go about its business. It was a fun year for the festival, even if sales were a bit down. We’re looking forward to next year!

On an administrative note, the site had some pretty good numbers over the weekend, but it seems the streaming server was struggling a bit with the load. We apologize for anyone that got the dreaded “failed to load” message, and we will strive to do better next year.

Bele Chere is by far the busiest time if year for the site, with thousands of people from all over the world checking in to see the festival live.

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Welcome to Bele Chere 2009

Published in Asheville Events on July 24, 2009
Prepping for Bele Chere 2009 - Asheville NC

It’s official, Bele Chere 2009 has officially arrived! As usual, on this very special occasion, we have changed all our camera views to give you live shots of the action. Our robotic West Cam (affectionately known as RoboCam) is still giving all us Asheville natives a good view of traffic conditions around the Westgate Bridge, but it now gives you some nice zoom shots of the craft tents set up along Patton.

We moved the North Cam over to the West side and it is currently giving us a view of College Street and a bit of North Lexington. The South Cam is pointed a bit more down towards the Pack Square end of Biltmore Ave. Finally, the East Cam (another robotic camera which we call RoboCam II) is showing some close zoom shots of Pack Square.

If a camera doesn’t load for you, try refreshing your page.

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