Bringing a specialist into the field, live put the senior tech on the link so the newer one did not have to guess. The person watching in that post knows more about roofs than the person on the roof. This post flips it. The person watching is a facility manager with twelve buildings. She knows more about the buildings than anyone, and less about the roof than the tech standing on it.
She cannot be on the roof of any of them. That is not a scheduling problem, it is the job. Twelve sites, one of her, a hatch and a ladder at each, and a service call at one of them most weeks. What she gets from the tech is a phone call from the parking lot and an invoice. What she gets from her own memory is whichever of the twelve roofs she was last on, which is none of them.
What the facility manager actually needs to see
Not the whole roof. Three things, usually, and the same three on every commercial flat roof I have serviced.
The rooftop unit. The tech has the panel off and is saying a part failed. She has no way to check that sentence from her office, and showing a customer the part that failed is the same problem with a homeowner in a hallway. On a commercial call the number is bigger and the person approving it is two buildings away.
The drain. Ponding is the thing a tenant reports and a facility manager cannot see. Where the water is standing, whether the strainer is there, what is packed into it, whether the water is moving at all. Thirty seconds of the camera on a drain says more than "it's clogged."
The seam, the penetration, the flashing. The membrane seam that is lifting, the curb around the unit, the pipe boot somebody sealed with the wrong product two years ago. The place the leak reported in suite 210 is actually coming from, which is never directly above suite 210.
The tech shows it live, from the roof
Setup is the tech's two minutes. Sign in on the phone, tap Go live, text her the link from the parking lot before going up the ladder. She taps it in the browser she already has. No app, no account, no prompt for her camera, which matters when the phone she is holding is a work phone on somebody else's IT rules.
Then the tech narrates the way you would for somebody who knows the building and not the roof. Say the building and the unit first. "Building seven, RTU three, the one over the east entrance." Then the condition. Then the plain version of what it means: "this is the blower motor, it should spin free, and it does not." If a part comes out, hold it to the camera before it goes in the truck.
If she wants a closer look she taps "I have a question about this," which saves the frame with a short note and puts it on the tech's screen while the tech is still standing there. She cannot talk to the tech through the link. The viewer side is watch-only: no chat, no microphone. Anything that needs a conversation happens by phone after the tech ends the inspection, and on an iPhone a call during the walk suspends the stream, so the tech does not answer until they are down.
Up to five people can watch at once on the same link. On a commercial call that is often her, the property owner's contact, and the tenant who reported it, none of them in the same building.
Filed under the building
The recording starts on its own and lands with our company in the dashboard, not on the tech's phone, with the stills the tech captured, any frames she flagged, and a timestamped history of when it started, when she joined, and when it ended.
The habit that makes it useful across twelve sites is naming. The tech says the building name, the address and the unit designation in the first ten seconds of every walk, and again over the still of the unit's data plate. On our side we keep our own index of which recordings belong to which building, and the recording carries the address in its own narration so it cannot be misfiled. When the same unit acts up in eighteen months, whoever is on call opens last time's walk before they drive, and the facility manager can watch what the last tech saw on that roof before she signs off on the next visit. Naming inspection photos so they make sense later is the same discipline for stills, and it matters more with twelve buildings than with one.
Recordings are private, reached through short-lived signed links rather than a public URL, and how long they stay available runs from 90 days to three years by plan. Three years spans a lot of service cycles on a rooftop unit. The security page has the specifics on who can open what.
Where it does not help
It does not get her on the roof. Whether the membrane is soft underfoot, whether the curb flashing is loose or only looks loose, whether the unit vibrates when it runs. The tech still has to touch those and say so out loud.
It does not sort out which of twelve roofs needs her attention first. It gives her a recording of one roof at a time. The comparison across sites is still her job, with the recordings as the material.
Signal on a commercial roof is variable. Steel deck, a parapet, a unit between the phone and the tower. Weak signal steps the picture quality down rather than freezing, and both sides see a warning, but on a roof with no usable connection the tech takes photos the old way and calls her from the ground. Check the signal before the ladder, not after.
And do not text her a link for the filter change. Routine service with nothing to decide is a photo job. The link is for the day the tech is about to say a number she has to approve without seeing it.
Where it fits
The live inspection use cases pillar has the two-question test: a decision, and somebody who cannot see the thing. A facility manager with a dozen sites answers the second question yes on every building she manages, every time. The use cases page sets out the commercial service pattern next to the others.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.