Opportunity

The UK has some of the finest surf beaches in the world and some of the best and most well known of these are in the South West of England. Here, the huge fetch of the Northern Atlantic can produce almost perfect surfing conditions, recognised both in the UK and around the world. These beaches regularly host world class surfing events with top surfers from Hawaii , Australia and the USA attending.

To the surfer, forecasts and still photos are fine but seeing the breaking surf, as it happens, is believing!

Solution

fiNETra installed its first camera at Polzeath Beach in Cornwall in 2006. Since then a further seven cameras have been added at Croyde Bay, Harlyn Bay, Cardigan Bay, Boscombe Pier, Bournemouth, Fistral Beach and Widemouth Bay.

The PTZ (pan, tilt and zoom) cameras are regularly updated providing high definition, TV quality, live action to fiNETra's own website livesurfcams.co.uk.

The Fistral Beach camera is also streamed direct to ITV's own website at www.itvlocal.com.

Results

Livesurfcams.co.uk now receives over 4,000 visitors daily. That's over 120,000 visitors per month from 87 countries! 75% of these visitors are repeat viewers, with the average viewer scanning at least 4 pages and spending at least 4 minutes per view.

In Aug 2008 Fistral Beach hosted The UK Boardmasters Championship, where the event was streamed live via fiNETra's camera. The site is now linked to many of the world's top surf sites and is referred to regularly. As a result of fiNETra's search engine optimisation, Live Surf Cams is consistently top ranking in searches.