View article

Live streaming is an increasingly popular way to broadcast videos ranging from formal news channels to kitten cams to home security camera feeds. Live streaming marries the rich detail of video with the timeliness of live transmission and the ease of use of consumer cameras, thus promising to vastly increase the amount of detailed, up-to-the minute information available about the real world. The volume of potentially interesting footage brings up the question of how end-users can avoid being glued to one (or worse, many) streams of videos waiting for events of interest. In this demo, we present Lookout, a system that allows users to register standing queries, called triggers over live video streams. Lookout then notifies the user when events of interest to them occur in their streams of interest. For example, a user could point to a cat cam and write a trigger that sends a notification when the cat wakes up and starts …