Smartphones Streaming Everything Everywhere

Deploying an Army of Smartphones to Stream Images of Everything

• BY SARAH MITROFF
• 12.13.12
• 6:30 AM

Koozoo’s suction-cup camera mount attaches an old smartphone to your window so you can livestream the world outside.Photo: Koozoo

If you’ve ever wanted to scope out the line at your favorite restaurant before you get there, or enjoy the same view that someone high up in a skyscraper sees, it’s worth checking out Koozoo. The San Francisco-based startup is assembling a network of live video cameras from cast-off smartphones to stream everything from the basketball court in the park across the street to a seascape halfway around the globe.

The setup is simple. Using an old smartphone (how about that iPhone 3G you have in the drawer?) with the Koozoo app loaded, and a suction-cup window mount and a power cord, you point the little sucker at something outside your home or office that others might find valuable or interesting. Tap record in Koozoo, and you’re streaming live to the Koozoo website where fellow streamers can choose among the video feeds.

“You can see what’s going on near you or around the world through your phone,” says co-founder Drew Sechrist. “I can see if there is line at the coffee shop around the corner, so I can avoid it or wait for a lull.”

Lines at the coffee shop are just one of the use cases that Sechrist and his co-founder Edward Sullivan have discovered since they launched Koozoo’s private beta earlier this year. The 100 or so people in the beta group have been using Koozoo streams to check the weather at the Marina Green (a notoriously foggy part of San Francisco), share views of their apartments with family, and witness the neighborhood celebrations that followed the San Francisco Giants winning the 2012 World Series.


A Koozoo live stream of the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco.Image: Koozoo

One of those early Koozoo users is Lauren Patti, who streams video of the foot traffic outside her apartment on Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. “I think it’s neat to see what’s going on in other parts of the city,” says Patti. Patti says she uses Koozoo to check the lines at her favorite restaurants, get an idea of the weather based on people’s outfits she sees in streams, and just keeps tabs on what’s happening outside her apartment.

To join the video network you first have to send a photo of your view to Koozoo to prove it’s worthy (at least according to the Koozoo team) of streaming. Any old iPhone or Android phone can connect to Koozoo, but the phone’s camera quality and your Wi-Fi bandwidth will affect the video stream quality.

When Koozoo launches to the public next year, the community of Koozoo viewers will also act as curators, highlighting a feed or sending it into obscurity by voting on whether the feed is interesting or not, and if the video is high quality. To use the network, you must offer a video stream.

Right now your privacy alarm bells are probably going berserk. It can be off-putting to imagine little smartphone cameras recording you everywhere you go. But as creepy as it sounds, you have a limited expectation of privacy in public and Koozoo says it will only allow shots of public spaces. “Private spaces with inappropriate content will be filtered out by the team,” says Sechrist.

For the time being, Koozoo isn’t recording any video (just live-streaming), so any illegal activity wouldn’t be recorded as evidence. The company has built an advisory team of computer scientists and privacy experts to keep things fair and legal going forward, says Sechrist, something the board comprised of the VCs and angel investors who recently kicked in $2.5 million in funding are especially keen on.

Once you get past the creepiness factor, the idea of Koozoo is kind of cool. Imagine checking the weather outside your distant office before you leave home, or watching the sunset over London from your desk. Though its business model is still in the works, like every network, Koozoo’s value will grow if the network does. With so much relying on the participation of sometimes less than reliable users, that could be a big if. Nonetheless, Sechrist envisions a global system of connected smartphone streams. “We want Koozoo connected devices to stream video from all over the world,” he says. “My ultimate goal is to walk down the street in Tokyo from anywhere in the world.”