I think I invented Reality TV

At the end of 1996 I made a presentation to a TV conference and I filled it with screenshots from a new webcam site that everyone was talking about called Jennicam. I told the conference that I was pretty sure we’d soon see lots of TV shows influenced by web sites like Jennicam and that we were all going to have to get used to watching people eating, scratching and shouting at each other on primetime TV.

Jennifer Ringley, Jennicam’s creator and sole star, became pretty famous because she left her webcam (seven of them, in the end) running twenty-four hours a day and didn’t seem to mind people watching her watching the TV, cleaning her teeth, plagiarising her college essays and (mostly) sleeping. Anyway, according to Silicon.com, Jennicam is no more – killed off by Paypal‘s policies on web site nudity.

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