Bandwidth and some ideas please

[MattDLEA]

Say I set up a webcam and streamed video to a website, if no one is watching the stream does it still take up my website bandwidth?

 

My plan is to try to set up a rasberryPi with a webcam attached that will either stream directly to my website so I can view it. Or if thats going to take up loads of bandwidth, make it so the web cam takes a pic every 5 mins or so then uploads it to my site.

 

Is that do able?

[matt40k]

Best bet is, as you say, upload static pictures regularly, ensure cache is switched off and you've got a javascript auto-refresh or something, or use something like ustream where you stream to them and they broadcast it, so you're no worrying about ports being opened or however much bandwidth you have.