On the last day of the year, Jack Perry sat watching the cars rolling up Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I was watching too. The traffic was sparse and the pavements, once thick with pedestrians, were all but empty, as they have been for nine months.
Neither of us was there though. I was at home, tuned in to livestream footage of this crossroads which is broadcast by Vuit, a free online TV station. Mr Perry, chief executive of its parent company Syncbak, was watching from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Others were watching from all over the country, part of a new audience of remote tourists glued to livestream footage of New York.
Brian Cury, founder of EarthCam, which has thousands of cameras all over the
