When Lucas Gordon, Comm and Comp ’24, created QBarLive in September 2023, he never imagined just how quickly and widely word would spread. Within the first week, the site was visited over 12,000 times. This number has since climbed to almost 200,000.
QBarLive live streams footage of popular bar lineups in Kingston. Active from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. every night, the site provides a look at how many people are in line for Stages, Ale House, The Brass Pub, and Trinity Social.
People, often students, use the video feeds to identify which places are most popular on a given evening, how long they can expect to wait in line, or if going out is worth it.
For some students, QBarLive makes or breaks their evening plans—if they can’t access the video feed, they won’t go at all.
Haleigh Schreyer, HealthSci ’24, told The Journal that when she couldn’t view the Stages line over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, she decided not to go at all since she couldn’t tell when the line was starting to form.
When Gordon moved into his current apartment, he realized he had a perfect view of the lines that would form outside of Brass and Trinity Social. His roommate had the idea to install a camera and livestream their new discovery. With a bit of research, Gordon realized this was a relatively feasible endeavour and got to work.
With no organized promotion, news about QBarLive spread rapidly via social media and word of mouth. Within a few hours of Gordon sharing the website to a few group chats, it received hundreds of views. The site has now collected over 52,000 individual s.
Following the website’s initial success, Gordon wanted to expand QBarLive’s scope to include the Stages and Ale House lines. With only two apartment buildings in the area with a direct line of sight, Gordon began to write letters to tenants, explaining his initiative and requesting to install a camera on their balcony in exchange for $50 per month.
A fellow Queen’s student and resident of Brock Towers accepted Gordon’s offer.
In Canada, it’s legal to video record people in public spaces without people’s consent as they don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, audio recordings are illegal and QBarLive’s cameras have audio recording disabled. To further protect privacy, QBarLive’s technology automatically blurs faces and license plates that are in clear enough view to recognize.
To stream a video feed in real time, Gordon’s server is programmed to locate a certain IP address associated to a wifi router and look for a specific port. The port acts a gateway for the video feed, allowing the server to access the footage and stream it on the website.
While this is a relatively simple process, Gordon had to navigate two issues when outsourcing one of his camera locations to a stranger’s balcony.
Firstly, residential routers have dynamic IP addresses, meaning the IP address will change periodically—this means for the server to retain access to the video stream, Gordon needs to be told the new address every time it changes.
A second issue is that the port access necessary for streaming live video requires istrative level access to the router. This means that Gordon would be able to access the internet activity and device histories of every connected to that router—this involves a certain level of trust between Gordon and the Brock Towers resident.
It would be possible to by the router requirements by inserting a SIM card directly into the camera and connecting to the server via cellular data, but Gordon mentioned this method would be significantly more expensive, and still wouldn’t guarantee a location to install the camera.
Overall, Gordon invested a significant amount of money into this project. His three cameras total around $1,000, on top of monthly costs of paying the Brock Towers resident and server host, totalling around $200 per month.
With a site like QBarLive, there are limited opportunities to profit financially—you could charge a subscription fee—which Gordon didn’t want to do—or sell ments. With the average spending only 26 seconds on the site per visit, Gordon said there isn’t a lot of demand for ments, and they make the site less visually appealing.
Despite generating absolutely no revenue from the site, Gordon says QBarLive was worth the investment.
“It’s been a fun project. It’s a cool feeling to make a product and see people getting utility from it,” Gordon said in an interview with The Journal.
With graduation on the horizon, Gordon plans to shut down QBarLive as the semester ends. This news comes as a shock to many students and dedicated fans.
While a few individuals have offered to take over the endeavour, Gordon said it would be too complicated for someone new to find a location to install the cameras.
Even though QBarLive may be nearing its end, bar line livestreams may be far from over. Students from the University of Western Ontario and University of Guelph, as well as several exchange students, have ed Gordon, eager to begin sites of their own.
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