Ever wish you could earn money by turning your daily life into a reality show that anyone could tune in to watch from anywhere around the world? It turns out you actually can.
SpiedLife is a growing international docu-reality platform that essentially allows people to turn their lives into reality shows with the help of webcams. If you have no problem installing a few webcams in your home and broadcasting your life to total strangers 24 hours a day, your average life could become the next Big Brother. SpiedLife allows streamers to stay in touch with their audience through chat rooms, track their channel’s popularity, and pays them for sharing their lives on the platform. But in a time where privacy is being taken more seriously than ever, many think that SpiedLife could have a dark side.
“We are excited by the growth of the SpiedLife platform,” Mario Sacco, casting director of SpiedLife said last year. “We continue to attract an audience from around the world, including over 10 million views per month. The first platform of its kind, SpiedLife opens the door to experimenting with new customs and cultures by showing real-life around the world with just a few simple restrictions… compliance with local laws and not to show nudity and sex.”
While some of the people who stream on SpiedLife are bar, pub or club owners essentially promoting their businesses for free, most are regular people who find the idea of streaming their average, boring or bizarre lives for a profit intriguing.
Most SpiedLife users seem to be located in Italy, which isn’t that surprising considering that the company behind the platform, Visioray, is also based in the European country. But browsing through the various streams on the SpiedLife home page, I could find users from Ukraine, the Philippines, and Russia, among others.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Visioray is also the company behind Skyline Webcams, a network of panoramic HD webcams showing live footage from various locations around the world. It now has millions of people tuning in every day to admire various tourist sites, from bustling cities to pristine desert oasis.
There’s no denying that SpiedLife is an interesting concept, but the idea of exposing most aspects of personal life, sometimes children included, can be hard to stomach for a lot of people.
“For a child, and most people, a home is where they can take shelter and be themselves,” one DigitalSpy Forums user wrote. “If they want to be silly, dance like a loon, throw a tantrum or just chill out then they can without fear of judgment from the outside world. By putting them in front of a camera it’s placing constraints on what they feel they can and can’t do, or they’ll do something that should be private and it will be broadcast.”
But that hasn’t stopped creators from using SpiedLife as a source of video content, essentially commenting the footage captured by the webcams of the unique social network.
