Coffee break blog: 107 live stream webcams to take your mind off things

5 minute read

Several times on this blog, we’ve written about business boardroom bingo jargon. The ‘touching bases’ the ‘take this off lines’ the ‘reaching for the low hanging fruits’.

If you run a business – no matter how large – you’re likely to have seen a new phrase creep into your day to day comms with both customers and colleagues recently – it’s ‘in these strange times’.

‘I hope you’re keeping well in these strange times’, ‘when these strange times are over’ etc.

Yes, times are strange. For many, they’re stressful and uncertain, too.

Sometimes you just need an excuse to take your mind off things for a moment.

So, next time you’re due a coffee break, take a little look at these live stream webcams from around the world, and parachute your mind’s eye away from work for a while.

Wildlife webcams

It’s reassuring to know that the natural world is carrying on, doing its thing. As Bruce Willis once said in an old episode of Moonlighting: “Bears bear and bees be.”

Wildlife live cams can make addictive viewing. Take the majesty of Woking Peregrines. Its webcam lets you watch these beautiful birds of prey as they do things like nurture their chicks.

The royal family have got in on the live streaming act, too. At the Balmoral Castle estate, they’ve set up cameras to keep an eye on their rare red squirrels and this is known, delightfully enough, as Squirrel Cam.

If you want to cast your (inter)net further afield, head to the Explore website, where there are hundreds of live streams to watch – from one that shows gorillas in rehabilitation in the forests of Kasugho in the Democratic Republic of Congo to cams from Orcalab in British Colombia, Canada, that continuously film orcas in the waters off Hanson Island.

The International Space Station

One of the most extraordinary achievements of science, engineering, international collaboration and vision, is the International Space Station. Construction began 21 years ago, and the ISS has been continuously occupied for more than 19 years. It maintains an average orbit of 250 miles – 400 kilometres – and completes one orbit in about 92 minutes, which means it’s travelling at more than 17,000 miles an hour.

NASA’s ISS webcam shows off the view of the earth from the ISS’s incredible vantage point, as well as internal views when the crew is on duty.

Orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes means that up-to 45 of those minutes are spent looking down at the dark side of the Earth, which might not make for the most inspiring viewing. If you tune in at one of these times, you can always fire your retros over to HDEV, the High Definition Earth Viewing experiment, which allows you to playback high definition recordings of previous orbits.

And, of course, if you switch off the sound of the chatter between the astronauts and mission control, you can add your own soundtrack to the majestic views of our home planet passing by.

Loch Ness

Loch Ness contains more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined, and yet that is not the reason people flock to its shores. The countryside around the loch is among the most spectacular in the whole of the British Isles and, yet, the holidaymakers who surround the loch tend to have their back to all this, as they stare at the water.

They’re looking for ‘the monster’.

If seeking out elusive sea monsters is your bag, you can do it from the comfort of your own laptop, thanks to the live webcam atop Urquhart Castle.

The website also picks out the most amusing images and links to news items about the search for the fabled beast. Plans have been floated to expand ways to watch the waves by introducing a boat cam and an underwater cam.

Hollywood

Fancy a trip to Hollywood? If the answer is yes, you can take a virtual flight to America and perch atop of Mount Lee, in Griffin Park, where you can look out over the top of the Hollywood sign at the expanse of Los Angeles stretching out before you. You can take in the Hollywood landscape 24 hours a day from this lofty vantage point.

Zoos worldwide

The zookeepers at Edinburgh Zoo have set up a series of webcams, including one in their panda enclosure, as well as 24/7 coverage of their penguin pool and, if that weren’t enough, you can even get safely up-close and personal with their tigers.

Over at San Diego Zoo, they have a memorable livecam in their elephant paddock, the webpage for which even gives you short biographies of the different elephants you can watch. They offer an amazing range of cams, ensuring that everything from koalas to giraffes to burrowing owls get their moment in the spotlight.

All of these cams have one thing in common – they are very slow paced, and relaxing. If you have a second screen on your desk, these cams invite you to call up their images on that second screen while you work on your first screen.