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.
