Garland P. Simon dreams of a world filled with cameras. Bedrooms, kitchens, traffic, tropical hurricanes, arctic snows, Super Bowl parties, wars, kennels -- she'd like lenses pointed at them all, the images filmed and broadcast over the Internet to the entire world. But she's not yet another Orwellian Big Brother or some kind of Kafkaesque new-economy control freak. She's simply the year-old, drawling CEO of Cammunity.
Back in , Cammunity was little more than an underdeveloped video search engine that returned plenty of pornography in its results. But since Simon took over in August of , Cammunity.
Simon, a former executive at ABC Sports and USA Networks, wants to harness the power of all these mechanical, online eyes and plans to vastly increase the size of her webcam network. In the long run, she hopes to build a democratic media giant that earns a sizable profit while offering a viable alternative to the calculated and saccharine top-down offerings of traditional media giants like Disney.
So far, the Atlanta company only draws about , unique visitors each month. Meanwhile, the market for reality-based content seems to be shrinking, judging by CBS's recent cancellation of "Big Brother. Nonetheless, Simon welcomes the challenge to revolutionize the webcam, build a business -- and alter what we watch on the Net.
Why would someone come to Cammunity. Isn't the public tiring of "real-world" programming? It's a matter of how the television converts hour programming into something that's entertaining to watch for an hour. They tried to make it exciting and failed. But that's what television requires -- an hour or so of programming.
