For the 1980 Original Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR), filmmaker Christopher Knight fitted several American competitors with Super 8 cameras.

Eventual winner Phil Weld’s trimaran Moxie carried an extraordinary 18 cameras.

Sailors were asked to film noteworthy events, or simply talk to the camera.

“Everyone produced usable footage for the final editing,” Weld later wrote.

The resulting American Challenge: Alone Against the Atlantic then aired nationally.

When I first saw it on DVD, I thought it resembled an early Big Brother, only lonelier and wetter.

By the 2000s, the Volvo Ocean Race was recording continuously, but with a twist: unless a sailor pressed a button after something interesting happened, the footage was overwritten.

This infamously captured Team Vestas hitting a reef at speed in the dark.

Now, the Golden Globe Race (GGR) has Window Live.

Screenshot from the GGR Window Live video ‘Will Mara Continue? Her Honest Thoughts from Sea’. Credit: www.youtube.com/@Goldengloberace

As well as the Window Live videos, you can track the fleet in real-time at goldengloberace.com/live-tracker

Modified Starlink Minis allow eight solo skippers to livestream for several hours a day, while otherwise supposedly ‘racing like it’s 1969’, without modern equipment.

But has technological progress improved the viewing experience?

Filmmaker Olivia Wyatt, who planned to compete in this GGR (See Channel Hopping, PBO December 2023 issue), says she withdrew because its non-negotiable media rights contract was ‘incompatible with her funding model.

Big Brother contestants don’t pay to play, and might leave with prize money and useful notoriety.

GGR competitors are more likely to arrive at the start already heavily in debt.

Gripping GGR Window Live episode

The arrangement became stranger still when Norwegian skipper Mara Løvenskiold Kveseth, unhappy with what she heard her shore team were (not) doing with her social media (via VHF chats with passing ships), used Window Live to express her displeasure.

She was reminded the system is one-way: we can watch the sailors, but they mustn’t use it to communicate with us.

But there’s another difference. Big Brother has editors. So did American Challenge.

Knight’s sailors chose when to turn their cameras on, then someone decided which of the thousands of feet of film we should see.

The Volvo system went further: it recorded everything, then deliberately lost almost all of it.

What does Window Live do differently?

Window Live reverses that progression.

Nothing need be forgotten, and nobody need decide what matters before we see it.

That job, in the moment, falls to the viewer.

Earlier this year, emerging from an overwhelming, seemingly endless exhibition of immersive digital projections, I photographed a line on the wall: “To have seen something, is to not have seen something else.”

There’s bound to be fascinating content somewhere in the hours of Window Live.

I’m just not sure how much of my own life I’m willing to spend looking for it.

Channel Hopping: Why the Golden Globe Race is a yacht race like no other

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What to read more features like Footage, footage everywhere in GGR Window Live?

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