Posts Tagged ‘stream’
Image of oil spewing enthralling – for the first 2 minutes
It’s beginning to feel like this has been with us forever.
And harder for us to believe that one of these days, or months, or years, it will be gone.
It’s the live video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. When BP engineers lowered those cameras in the first place, you can bet they never imagined that the resulting pictures would be watched by hundreds of millions of infuriated people around the world.
They were for in-house use — to monitor the well, a well that was intended to be an uncontroversial source of enormous profit for the oil company. The cameras were like the security cameras that most corporations install around their office buildings. Just a little something so the bosses can keep their eye on things…
The ceaseless image of the oil spewing has become like an international night light — except without the comfort. It’s always there. We can count on it, even though we’d prefer not to.
It has become the logo of the disaster. It is a ghastly portrait in perpetual motion. Every time there is a dash of hope that the oil will stop gushing, something newly bad happens. In recent days, it was the temporary removal of the containment cap deep in the Gulf. The oil surged harder. And we, in our spare moments, watched.
The television feed is like a heartbreaking mutation of those lava lamps from the 1960s and 1970s — those oddly shaped doodads with the colorful churn of liquid trapped inside, an undulating mixture hypnotic in its incessant and random kinetic swirl. The terrible difference, of course, is that the frantic churn from the oil pipe is not trapped. It is freely headed toward unwelcoming shores.
In my neck of the prairie, folks who maintain a fascination with that live feed are as demented as rubberneckers who hit their brakes and slow down to peer at carnage on the opposite side of the freeway after an accident.
But, the lazy dullards of the entertainment-as-news brigade really drive me to distraction when they stick a frame in the corner of “news” programs, hour after hour after hour showing that fracking bubbling pot at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. What are we supposed to learn from it? There’s nothing in that video as entertaining as a lava lamp is to a stoner.
About as useless as prayer groups gathering to implore some sky-dude to stop the leak.
Reality TV for truly stupid TV producers.
U.S. Military deluged by data stream from drones
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.
Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.
But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes…
Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once. By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for as many as 65 after that. Even the Air Force’s top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, says it could soon be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data…”
RTFA. So far the best tools for interpreting the data stream remain the eyeball and the human brain.
If anything, the military stands the best chance of learning how to handle the technology – from ESPN. The folks in those trailers parked outside an NFL game have already figured out how to handle multiple data streams. Play by play.
Hurricane Ike – live from Houston
www.khou.com is streaming live – right-click on the link and open in a new window or a new tab – when you get to their stream page, click on the video image to start the stream.
Update: Their servers are getting heavily loaded – transmission erratic.
If you’re a DirecTV subscriber, they’re carrying KHOU live on channel 361. If it doesn’t show up, reboot your receiver and it will add the channel.
