The Boston Globe

Larry Fair and his son, Joshua, started Live Internet Weddings in Waikiki, in 2001. The company is one of dozens of small, relatively new, start-ups that team with hotels and resorts or offer their services online to couples planning destination weddings.

Fair said his firm has produced about 130 live, online wedding broadcasts in the past year, up from about 33 the prior year. Wedcasts from Hawaii's scenic spots are particularly popular with California couples.

In August, Joshua Fair hiked 15 minutes up a mountain to a waterfall on Oahu, packing his video camera, with one California couple, their minister, and their photographer to film their ceremony.

A decade ago, Larry Fair said, not enough invitees would have had the broadband connection necessary to handle streaming video. Today, more than two-thirds of US computer users subscribe to broadband, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. "We've reached the tipping point," Fair said.

Valerie DeRoy and Bryan Sklar's wedcast was for those who were not invited to their Nov. 8, 2006, wedding. And that was just about everybody they knew.

Unknown to DeRoy, who was to leave her home in Plantation, Fla., on Sunday for a computer-security conference in Waikiki, Sklar was plotting a surprise wedding in Waikiki on the following Wednesday. He would join his fiancee and whisk her away to Secret Beach, an hour's drive away on Oahu's western coastline, for the ceremony.

Sklar completed most of his planning, on the sly, on Saturday. First, he contacted DeRoy's boss to request a couple days off for her so she could get married. Sklar bought his ticket to Hawaii and searched the Internet for a rabbi to conduct the ceremony. On Sunday, after dropping DeRoy at the airport, he went shopping with her sister for a wedding dress.

When Sklar arrived at her hotel, she accepted his proposal. The couple sent out 150 Evites to family and friends, many around Philadelphia where Sklar grew up. The invitations included directions for calling up their ceremony on LiveInternetWeddings.com and a request for RSVPs so they would know who would be watching.

"I got married on a sunset beach in Hawaii with my family watching," Sklar said. "What else could I ask for?"

His father and stepmother (her parents are deceased) interrupted a California vacation to fly to Hawaii for the day. Everyone else watched the ceremony, in real time, including Beverly Downey, a friend of DeRoy's. The former security guard for the Massachusetts Lottery watched the sunset wedding during her night shift at the lottery's Braintree headquarters. "You felt you were sharing the moment," Downey said.

Watching simultaneously was key, she said. "If I'd watched it later, it wouldn't have been the same."

DeRoy said that one advantage of Internet weddings is that they are less expensive for those who watch, because nobody has to travel.

But it's also less expensive for the couple, who can stage a small event, share it over the Internet, and "it won't cost them a bloody fortune," she said.

"At my age, I'd rather spend money on the honeymoon," said DeRoy, who is 47.

The couple's entire wedding, including Sklar's air fare, cost less than $5,000.