SANParks.org Forums

An excellent suggestion!

However, this camera needs constant maintenance as it is, and it will progress technologically over time.

Ultimately, it may become a high res. live running stream in years to come!

Of course the other thing, which I have often seen discussed in relation to this, is the size of the images, and thus the resultant storage, but more importantly the bandwidth. I believe the latter is the most limiting factor. Remember these things are "out there" in the African bush, or the desert as the case is with Nossob. Bandwidth is at a premium.

Somebody like DuQues I think has the figures usually close to hand in terms of how many Gig a month is used just currently. And the data line from Kruger is used not just for the cams, but for all other IT requirements of the Park and camps as well. Running Kruger/KTP is priority, not the cams.

Actually, it's not Gigabytes anymore, but Terabytes... And that's with pics of around 20 Kb!

So while the cameras certainly can do it, including live streams, both cost and lines will not allow doing that in the nearer future.
The Nossob cam is even worse, those signals are bounced of a satellite, and power is only on during part of the day.

As bishop3006 also says, the lines are business first, pleasure later.

Thanks for the suggestions but as said by bishop3006 and DuQues, bandwidth is really a very scarce commodity at these remote places. The same data links are used to run the SANParks day-to-day business (e-mails/reservation and front office system, credit/debit card verification, etc which is always more important than the feed from the webcams.

We try to limit the image byte size to between 15k and 30k. This translates to around 72Mb of images from each webcam daily. This is not a lot if we had a 1Mb data line to Nossob, Orpen or Satara. Unfortunately we do not have it for two main reasons:

• Technology is not there and no comms company can give that to us to these sites at the moment
• If the comms companies could (and they might be able to do that to certain sites sometime next year), it is quite expensive (1Mb diginet link to Kruger National Park area is around R17 000 per month). Not worthwhile at the moment. Data link costs are however dropping in this country and it will hopefully become much cheaper
• A lot of our viewers have slow data links to the Internet and if we push down images of 200k each every 30 seconds, these viewers will not be able to see any images at all as they will get the new image even before the previous image is finished downloading. Lots of our virtual visitors have an Internet cap in place from their ISP's. The data cap will be reached very quickly - watching three webcams with a 100k image from each cam every 30 seconds will use around 36Mb per hour!

Technology is progressing every day and we may soon have better quality images! All three webcams can even do live video and audio streaming...but not via the current data links (as yet!).

Hope this helps!

Hi all!

Since the rain the animal sightings have plummeted, but my beloved KNP has finally turned green. So I have mixed feelings

Thus, a question for those who have seen this cycle before on the cams. How long after the initial rains do the sightings return?

As long as surface water is readily available, animals will not travel to water sources. This depends on many factors, including type of earth in the vicinity, more rain, degree of ground saturation, wind and sun.

So, there is no time table, just the natural course of nature. Enjoy it!

Can anyone tell us , how big and deep the waterhole at Nossob is,,,,seems to be small on the cam.

Hi, I don't know if this had been discussed before:
Why aren't there any live streaming webcams in Kruger (with sound)? I know of quite a few live streaming webcams on the internet.
The webcam in Satara is very close to camp, so it would be very easy to maintain it.
And even if you don't make it a live streaming webcam, you could let it refresh more often. Like once every 1 or 2 seconds.

Here and on is the reason streaming is not possible yet...

good afternoon.
could anyone please tell me why one or more of the cams are constantly down?

Hi Aqua 5,

The connection to Kruger was down earlier this week (Satara cam). I am not sure what the problem is now, but IT is investigating.
If you look at the daily and monthly sightings you will see that the cams are not constantly down.

the cam at orpen was down for about 2 weeks untill just recently.
when the elephant appeared on the cam yesterday in an interesting shape, the cam went down immediatly.
is something being hidden from us?

Nothing to hide, Aqua5.

Nothing but Wild dogs, pangolins mating, the serval with her cubs, and of course the lion kill.

The lines to Kruger are fragile, and IT is sometimes on the blink. I'm personally amazed that the cams are up that much, especially the Nossob one.

aqua5, I understand your feelings quite well. Every time I switch on my computer and go to the cams (first thing in the morning, last thing at night, almost the whole time throughout the day... ) and I find one or more of them down, I feel a bit depressed. Then I have to remind myself that SANParks is not obliged to offer them to me at all. It's a treat that I can't take for granted. The cams take up quite some bandwidth which, I'm sure, could be saved or used for business matters. Plus, they are in a location where power failure and broken pipes are not that uncommon, meaning they are in the middle of the bush. Hence, I'll have to live with the cams working erratically and make the most of what they offer (which usually is a lot) when they are on. Also, I do throw in an ocassional buck or two into conservation or the webcams directly and hope it'll help to keep them alive altogether.