The first time I tried to send a homeowner a full walkthrough, I shot twelve minutes of 4K on a two story colonial and hit send on an email. Gmail told me the attachment was too large. The file was four and a half gigabytes. The limit is twenty five megabytes. I was off by a factor of a hundred and eighty. Sending large inspection videos turns out to be a genuinely hard problem, and every workaround fails in its own specific way.
Here is the arithmetic, and here is what people actually end up doing.
What a walkthrough actually weighs
Phone video is bigger than people assume.
1080p at thirty frames a second runs roughly 130 megabytes a minute on a modern phone. 4K at thirty is closer to 350. 4K at sixty can push past 400.
So a ten minute walk is about 1.3GB at 1080p and around 3.5GB at 4K. A thorough inspection on a cut-up roof with an attic pass runs closer to twenty minutes, which is seven gigabytes. Multiply that by what a three-truck shop runs in a week and you are moving something like 300GB a month of video that has to get from a phone into a homeowner's hands.
Every delivery path and how it fails
Email. Attachment limits are twenty five megabytes on the consumer providers. You will never send an inspection video as an attachment, not a trimmed one, not a smaller one. The category is closed.
Text message. This one appears to work, which is the trap. MMS compresses hard, and iMessage will re-encode a large video down to something that will move. What arrives is a soft, blocky version of your walkthrough in which the exact thing you were pointing at, the hairline crack or the lifted nail, is no longer visible. You sent proof and they received mush.
Consumer cloud drive. Works technically, fails socially. The homeowner taps the link and hits a sign-in wall, or a request access button that emails you at nine at night, or a file that wants to download three gigabytes onto a phone with 400MB free. A real percentage of people quietly stop here and tell you they will look at it later, which means never. Nobody ever tells you the link did not open.
Transfer services. Files expire in seven days. Six months later, when somebody needs to know what the roof looked like before the hailstorm, the link is dead and so is the file.
Unlisted video hosting. Better than the rest, and I know shops that run this way. Two problems: the upload is slow, and you have put footage of a stranger's house, their back yard, and their cars on a public platform protected by nothing but an unguessable URL.
A thumb drive. I have done it. It requires a second trip, which is the thing we were trying to eliminate.
The upload cost of sending large inspection videos
This is the part nobody budgets for, because it does not show up until you count it.
Upload speed is the constraint, not download. A typical LTE upload in the field is five to ten megabits. Call it eight. A 3.5GB file is 28,000 megabits. That is roughly fifty eight minutes of uploading, assuming the connection holds, which on a job site it does not.
So the inspector sits in the truck waiting, or drives off with the upload running until the phone locks and the app suspends it, or gives up and sends it from the shop at seven that evening, by which point the homeowner's window of interest has closed.
Now do that four times a day. That is where the afternoon goes.
What actually works
Whatever you use for sending large inspection videos has to do three things.
It has to require nothing of the viewer. No install, no account, no permission request. The link plays the way a news video plays when you tap it in a text.
It has to stream rather than download, so a three gigabyte file never has to fit on a phone that is already full of photos.
And it has to still exist in eighteen months, stored somewhere that is organized by property and date rather than by a filename like IMG_4417, with a decision already made about how long it lives and who inside your company can pull it up. Footage of a stranger's property is not marketing collateral.
The other way around this whole problem is to not create the file in the first place. If the homeowner watches while you walk, delivery stops being a step at all. That tradeoff is laid out job by job in live inspection video versus recorded and sent, and delivery friction deserves more weight in that decision than most people give it when they start.
What the file is and is not
A stored walkthrough is a record of what an inspector observed on a given date at a given property. That is genuinely useful a year later, when nobody remembers what the roof looked like and the only alternative is somebody's memory.
It is not a claim document. I describe condition. I do not tell a homeowner what anything is worth, whether to file, or what their policy covers. I am a contractor, not a licensed public adjuster. Coverage is between them and their insurer.
If you want to see how the link behaves on a homeowner's phone, how it works walks through it from both ends, and pricing covers storage per job instead of charging by the gigabyte. Compare that against what your current way of sending video actually costs you in minutes per week.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.