Meet the Filmmaker Who Is Installing Live Cams All Over the World

What's This?

Charles Annenberg Weingarten, founder of Explore.org, which is funding cameras around the world to record nature.

By Seth Fiegerman2014-06-25 12:00:25 UTC

"Right now, as we're speaking, I’m looking at hippos at a watering hole in Africa," Charles Annenberg Weingarten says with a mix of salesmanship and genuine wonder. "Waves are breaking at Pipeline Beach."

Weingarten isn't standing near any hippos in Africa nor is he dipping his toes in the sand at the beach. He's sitting on a green couch in a converted apartment in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by six barking dogs. In front of him, there's a screen showing just a few of the many live camera feeds he has helped to install around the world. Cameras are streaming footage of brown bears waiting patiently for salmon in Alaska, stingrays gliding past coral in the UK, closeups of honey bee colonies buzzing inside their hive in Germany, and yes, animals gathered around a remote watering hole in Kenya.

Explore, the organization Weingarten started, has installed more than 75 high-definition cameras in parks and facilities on four continents since 2011 with plans to expand to at least one other continent in the near future. He expects to have as many as 150 cameras on the ground in the next year.

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The group is approaching 100 million hours of footage streamed online and its website, Explore.org, now gets about 30 million page views a month from just under one million visitors. Its reach would be significantly larger if you factored in all the outlets that carry the feeds, including Animal Planet, CNN and ABC News.

For Weingarten, who describes himself as a thinker, entrepreneur, philanthropist and filmmaker, among other lofty titles, the goal isn't necessarily to build a media empire, and it's certainly not to lay the groundwork for Big Brother. The goal is to use technology as a gateway to nature rather than a barrier to it.

"I often call these pieces Zen Dens," he says of the live streams. At any time of day, viewers can minimize one browser window — with all their social media feeds, emails and updates from the never-ending news cycle — and open up a new tab that shows the outside world unfolding at a more peaceful pace. "With all these gadgets, we are overwhelmed with choice. Everything is so fast. I hope that the cameras give you refuge and help you slow down."

"It could be the future of conservation," he adds, as the dogs bark again in the background. "I think of it as the future of national parks."

Brown bears look for salmon at Kitmai National Park in Alaska while a set of cameras broadcast their efforts to people at home.

Parks of the future?

Roy Wood had all but given up on the idea of having a webcast of his brown bears. The equipment was expensive; one technical problem surfaced after another; and the Internet connection wasn't exactly top-notch in rural Alaska. Then, in spring 2012, three years after he effectively scrapped the idea, Wood got a call from one of Weingarten's associates at Explore.

"What he explained to me was that he and Charlie had been putting these cams everywhere and they were looking for the next big bear," recalled Wood, who works as a ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve, home to thousands of brown bears. "They had pandas. They had polar bears. What's next? Brown bears..."

"Money's no object," the Explore reprsentative told him. "Don't worry. We've got it covered."

Sure enough, Explore provided Katmai National Park with a $150,000 grant to hire additional staff. Explore also paid for Internet service and recruited people to install nine security-quality cameras that could withstand the elements, including 100 mph wind gusts.

The year before they called Wood out of the blue, Weingarten and his organization had kicked off Explore's live cam efforts by providing a $50,000 grant to Polar Bears International, a conservation group, to pay for equipment to webcast the one thousand or so polar bears in Manitoba. Those who have worked with him say Weingarten is particularly partial to bears.

"He definitely has an affinity for them," says Wood, before opening up about the first time Weingarten came to visit the park. "He kept referring to the bears as 'the high priests of the forest' and man he was really connecting with them on deep, deep levels."

Weingarten used similar language to describe the operation when we talked with him earlier this month.

"I really think of that as one of the world’s great natural cathedrals," he says of Katmai. "That would make the brown bear the high sage and the park ranger the keeper of the temple."

Wood may not put "keeper of the temple" on his business card anytime soon, but he isn't inclined to disagree with Weingarten or Explore. The live feed they helped set up now gets as many as 20,000 simultaneous viewers at its peak, which just happens to be about as much as the total number of people who visit the parks in an entire year.

"To have that many people watching the bears and to be exposed to the beauty of this place is a tremendous success for us," Wood says. That doesn't mean more people will end up visiting the brown bears or any of the other remote locations featured on Explore. "I have noticed that there's a lot more interest [in trips], but I think the barriers to visiting here are still insurmountable for the population as a whole."

The hope for Wood and other conservationists we spoke with is just that the live streams raise awareness.

"I’m a great believer in public outreach about wildlife," says Stephen Kress, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society, which has worked with Explore to broadcast puffins in Maine. "Having cameras on the islands is really the only way that most people are going to see the birds. And without seeing them, we can’t hope that people will protect [them]."

A live cam installation at Kitmai National Park in Alaska.

Scions and cameras and bears, oh my

Weingarten likes to say that the "real power" of the live cams for viewers is "escapism." But if there's one person who you'd assume wouldn't have much need to escape from his everyday life, it's Charles Annenberg Weingarten.

Weingarten, 46, is the grandson of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire philanthropist and former publisher of TV Guide and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Weingarten's mother Wallis runs the Annenberg Foundation, a family foundation which invests significant resources in nonprofits. His brother and sister each have positions at the organization.

All of which is to say that Weingarten comes from a prominent family with resources and a fair amount of influence. But his friends and associates describe him as someone who lives a modest, laid-back life. He resides in a two-bedroom bungalow in Santa Monica, drives a Honda Element and spends his free time surfing, getting cheap Thai massages and hanging out with his dog Lucky.

He began his career by studying film at the University of Southern California. He worked as a writer and director for a creative agency and opened up a yoga clothing company called EnerChi. Then, in 2006, Weingarten launched Explore as a subdivision of the Annenberg Foundation to film and photograph people "doing good work." With that in mind, he travelled to Greenland, Rwanda and the Middle East to film documentaries about the environmental, ethnic and religious dramas unfolding in each region, respectively.

"He and his siblings have a mandate to be philanthropists. That's not always easy," says Amy Waddell, a filmmaker who worked with Weingarten on some of those documentary projects in the 2000s. "I think he wanted to do something with that film background and this was a way to do it."

Somewhere along the way, however, Weingarten grew "frustrated" with the process of making "traditional" films. "It took so long and needed so many peoples' approval," he says. "I was always so frustrated with the way stories were presented. I had a fantasy of combining film, philosophy, photography and using the web as a hub to bring people around it to celebrate it."

In 2011, Weingarten decided to take Explore down a slightly different path with a new project called Pearls of the Planet that would invest in live cam operations around the world. Explore committed "seven figures" for testing and to get the operation off the ground. That investment has only grown over the years.

"It's like running a mini studio," he says. There are about ten people on staff and many others who help out ranging from staffers at the Audubon Society to "inner city kids manning bison cameras."

If you stream it, who will come?

Weingarten has big ideas for ways to continue expanding Explore's live cam operation. Explore is setting up operations in South America and reviewing proposals for Antarctica and Australia. He is pushing to get more cameras in underwater settings and interested using drones to capture footage of poaching of endangered animals, though he admits the latter may not be "realistic." Weingarten is also considering encouraging other users to share footage from their cameras on Explore.org, a model that would be similar to YouTube.

As Weingarten explains his vision for Pearls of the Planet, there are moments when one might feel like they're hearing the very innocent beginnings of a dystopian story like The Circle by Dave Eggers. In that novel, a fictional technology company modeled after Google unveils a small, affordable high-resolution video camera called SeeChange, which can be used to stream real-time footage from outdoors. The first demonstration, given by the company's cofounder, is a live feed of waves crashing on a beach. By the end, it morphs into a powerful surveillance tool for private moments.

Explore's cameras are neither covert nor cheap, and it is entirely focused on the beach rather than the bedroom. The concern that Weingarten has isn't so much about privacy as purity.

"One of the things that concerns me is these cameras being exploited or commercialized and sensationalized," he says. Weingarten worries that corporations may try to get their branding in front of the cameras, or that "people want to set up live cams to watch animals kill other animals."

Perhaps a more fundamental concern for Explore is whether the live cams will end up pushing viewers to embrace nature more, or have the opposite effect by making it too easy for people to "experience" the outside world from behind their computer screens.

"Hopefully it will make you want to get off the computer and get out there — and if not 'out there,' at least under a tree or at the local park," he says, before admitting it could go either way. "We’ll see if there’s more good than bad."

Topics: Business, Media, Social Good