• by Ben Frederick , Staff Writer @mp_benfred, July 7, 2016

So Explore.org’s bear cam is back. That’s right, the four-camera livestream at Katami National Park in Alaska that we all know and love is as much in season as the salmon those bears are after.

With Facebook recently shelling out a hefty $50 million to celebrities to develop live stream content, maybe all they had to do was point some cameras at an idyllic glade somewhere and rake in the views.

In a way, it’s the American version of the Scandinavian “slow TV” movement: Iceland recently broadcast a live stream of a car circumnavigating the country while Sigur Rós played in the background. Other popular streams have included live knitting and three days’ worth of a cruise off the coast of Norway.

As demand for video content rises from mobile users, Facebook, and by extension pretty much every other publisher, is attempting to meet it by hosting whatever content they can on their sites in the hopes of being shared or discovered at the top of Google’s rankings.

Most publishers embedded a video stream and a short description of what to expect and the new features of the bear cams. Most of them are ranked higher on Google’s results than Explore.org.

Somewhere between revenue streams, a disrupted publishing industry, mobile users looking for more content and giant social platforms that subsume the Internet, there are some hungry bears eating salmon out of a river -- the way they’ve always done it.