This cluster spends most of its time comparing live video to recorded video and to photo reports. Live inspection video versus photo reports is the head-to-head.
Aerial imagery deserves its own entry, because it is a genuinely good tool that is frequently compared to the wrong thing.
The framing I hear is competitive: we already fly the roof, so what would live video add? That treats the two as substitutes. They are not. They produce different records, in different formats, answering different questions, and the honest answer to "which is better" depends entirely on which question you are trying to settle.
What an aerial set is very good at
Three things, and it beats a walkthrough at all three.
Overview and geometry. The whole roof in one frame, every plane, every valley, the relationship between the sections. A person walking a complicated roof with a phone cannot produce that image, and trying to is a waste of the walk.
Surfaces nobody should be standing on. Steep pitch, brittle tile, a deck you do not trust, a second storey with no safe access. If the alternative is a person on it, fly it. That is not a documentation decision, it is a safety one, and it wins.
Repeatable measurement. An aerial pass flown the same way twice gives you two comparable images. Useful, and hard to do on foot.
None of that is in dispute and none of it is what this post is arguing with.
What live inspection video adds to an aerial set
The thing an aerial image cannot do is talk.
A homeowner handed a set of overhead photographs is holding a very clear picture of a roof they cannot read. They can see it is a roof. They cannot see which of those grey patches is the problem, whether it is bad, or what happens if it is left another year. So the conversation goes back to a person describing the images, which puts you exactly where you were before — the customer is trusting a description, and the beautiful photograph did not change that.
A live walkthrough is a different artifact because the explanation is inside it. The inspector is standing next to the condition, pointing at it, saying what it is and why it matters, at the moment the customer is looking at it. Questions get answered against the actual thing rather than against a memory of it. Describing what you see out loud is the skill that makes that worth watching.
There is also a detail difference that runs the other way from what people expect. An aerial pass is usually flown at a height that shows layout. Granule loss, a hairline split in a boot, the state of a sealant bead — those are close-range observations. Somebody has to get near them.
They are separate files, and that is fine
Worth being plain about the mechanics, because it affects how you file things.
InspectStream streams the rear camera of the phone in the inspector's hand. It does not take in a drone feed, and there is no import step for aerial imagery. Your overhead set stays wherever you already keep it.
So a fully documented job has two artifacts: an aerial set that shows the layout, and a recorded walkthrough with narration, stills and a timestamped event history that shows the conditions and what was said about them. Two files, two purposes, both dated.
That is less tidy than one system holding everything, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What it costs you is a cross-reference in the job file. What it buys you is that neither tool is compromised to fit the other.
The order that works
Fly first, walk second, if you are doing both on the same visit.
The aerial pass gives you the map. Then, when you are on the roof with the customer watching, you can say "this is the valley in the upper left of the photo you were sent" and they can place it. Orientation is the single hardest thing about watching somebody else's camera, and an overhead image that the viewer has already seen solves it for free.
If you are only doing one, the choice is not about which is better. It is about what the visit is for:
- Sizing a job, a complicated roof, an unsafe surface: fly it.
- Explaining a finding to the person paying for it: walk it live.
- Anything that will be read back months later by someone who was not there: the narrated walkthrough, because it carries its own explanation.
The question neither one answers
Worth ending here, because it is where both tools get oversold.
An image, from any altitude, shows a condition at a moment. It does not show what caused it, when it happened, or what it will do next. Those are judgements a person makes, and the honest version of any inspection record is that it documents the observation and attributes the judgement to the inspector who made it, out loud, on the record.
That is true of a photograph from four hundred feet and equally true of a video from four feet. The advantage of the walkthrough is only that the judgement and the evidence arrive in the same file, in the inspector's own voice, at a timestamp — so anyone reading it later can tell which part was seen and which part was concluded.
The inspection workflow end to end is on how it works, and the field situations it is built around are on use cases.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.