Live inspection video versus photo reports works through choosing between the two. This is what happens when you chose live and the other side did not show up.
You set the inspection up, texted the link, glanced at the count before you climbed. Zero. You are ten minutes in and it is still zero. Nobody tapped.
It happens more than the demos suggest, and how you handle the next thirty minutes is worth thinking about once rather than improvising every time.
Do not stop narrating
The thing to settle first, because it is the thing most people get wrong.
An empty viewer count does not mean nothing is being captured. The inspection is recording, and the recording is now the only artifact anyone gets. Going quiet because nobody is listening produces thirty minutes of shingle with no commentary, which is a worse record than a dozen captioned photographs and takes longer to review.
So talk. Location before detail, scale said out loud, what is fine as well as what is not, limits volunteered. The whole discipline from describing what you see out loud applies unchanged.
If it helps, think of the recording as a viewer who is definitely going to watch and is simply running late. That is often literally true.
They may still arrive
Somebody in a meeting at ten past gets out at twenty past. The count moves. This is normal and it is worth watching for, because a viewer arriving mid-walk needs a reset: where you are on the building, what you have already covered, what is left. When the homeowner joins late has the wording.
The cost of missing that is a customer who watched the last third of an inspection and thinks the whole thing was about a chimney.
What zero usually means
Four things, in rough order of frequency.
They are at work. The most common by a distance. Nine in the morning on a Tuesday is a working day for most people and a link is not a calendar invitation.
The text did not land, or landed as a link they did not trust. An unexpected message with a URL from a number they have not saved is a message a lot of people ignore on principle, and they are not wrong to. This is the one worth fixing.
They did not understand it was live and time-limited. They assumed it was a video that would be there later, which is a reasonable assumption about almost every other link anyone gets.
They genuinely did not want to watch. Some customers do not want the detail and are not being difficult. That is a legitimate preference.
Only the middle two are yours to solve, and both are solved before the appointment rather than during it.
The fix is in the text, and in the phone call before it
The link arriving cold is what produces most zeros. Two changes fix most of it.
Tell them beforehand, out loud, that it is coming. On the booking call: "I will text you a link when I get there. Tap it and you can watch the whole inspection on your phone. It takes about half an hour and it stops working when I am done."
That last clause is the important one. Without it, nobody knows the link is perishable.
Write the text so it explains itself. A bare URL from an unknown number is a message people delete. "This is Dave from the roofing job at 14 Elm — tap here to watch the inspection live, it starts in five minutes" is a message people tap. It costs ten seconds.
If the customer wants to know what they are tapping before they do, what to expect when you watch an inspection is written for them and reads as reassurance rather than a sales page.
Afterwards: do the walkthrough anyway
Zero viewers does not mean zero conversation. It means the conversation moves.
Call them, and go through the two or three things that matter while they have the recording open if they can, or from your notes if they cannot. That is most of the value of the live version with the order reversed, and for a fair number of people it is actually better, because they can rewind.
What you should not do is send the recording alone and consider the job communicated. A thirty-minute video with no guidance is a file nobody watches. Three sentences and a timestamp — "the thing worth looking at is around eleven minutes in" — turn it into something they will actually open.
What to read into a pattern of zeros
One empty inspection tells you nothing. Five in a row tells you something, and it is worth being honest about which something.
If nobody is watching on a particular kind of job — routine maintenance, annual checks, work where nothing is being decided — that is not a failure. It is the test in when live inspection video is worth it returning a correct answer. Those jobs want a recording and a phone call, and setting up a live viewer for them is two minutes you are spending for nothing.
If nobody is watching across the board, including on jobs with a real decision riding on them, the problem is almost always the invitation rather than the product. Check what the text actually says. Check whether anyone is telling customers beforehand. Those are training problems and they are cheap to fix.
The setup from your end, including what the viewer count is telling you, is on the how it works page.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.