live video chat....mainly for adults (webcamnow.com)

Name: sully5059

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Product:	webcamnow.com
Date:	05/09/01 (28404 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: make friends

Disadvantages: the problems of the unmonitored section

When I first bought my webcam over a year ago, I was searching the net for some good software to use with it. One of the sites I found was Webcamnow. I looked at it for a while, and it seemed interesting to me – there were a number of chat rooms, and the ability to use the free software to broadcast pictures to other users. For a few months, I spent quite a lot of time on the site until I eventually got bored with it.

There are two different sections for the site - friends and family is for the average user who wants to chat and broadcast, or just chat and watch other broadcasts. The other section, unmonitored, is strictly adults only. And, once again, I will repeat – strictly adults only! This is the reason for this section being more populated that the friends and family one – there are many broadcasts of an adult nature, and there is very strong language in the chat rooms. I use the term “chat rooms” loosely for this section, as usually it’s full of people requesting those on cam to…ummm…perform actions. As you only need to pick a chat room nickname and don’t need a webcam to enter the chat room, there have been men pretending to be women too. Scary stuff.

Another warning - some people have software that can capture pictures from broadcasts, and not just for personal use – imagine searching the net for your online nickname, to find a website which had some less-than-flattering pictures of you.

The basic membership to the site is free, and they advertise that the picture broadcasts update at a rate of 6 frames per minute, so that’s one update every 10 seconds which seems adequate. Or, for $9.95 a month, you can opt for “Speedster” which offers 60 frames per minute. This is aimed at people with broadband connections who want to watch/broadcast at higher speeds. If you’re just chatting with
someone, I’m sure you don’t need to see their picture updating every second, so maybe its also aimed at a certain type of viewer (wink). I don’t feel that it’s worth the cost though, as you don’t really need it, and you may only be trying to watch people with slow connections anyway.

The site can be useful – you could chat with friends without them having to download any special viewing or chat software. There are a large number of chat rooms available (30 in the friends and family section), so it should be easy to find one that’s empty to talk to them. But on the other end of the argument, you may see someone and want to talk to them, but have no idea what chat room they’re in.

If you were to use it, I would recommend just using the friends and family section. Although, another problem I had was that after I gave up on the unmonitored section, I changed my broadcast option to friends and family. Yet, when I tried it, I could still only be seen in the monitored section. I even set up a new account and had the same problem. Strange.

So, it’s an okay site. I have made some friends on there which I now chat to on AIM and ICQ, and it’s good that you can chat with people and see them at the same time (though there are other alternatives for this).

Summary: Experience of webcamnow - a live video chat site