A homeowner in Broken Arrow asked me a question I did not have a good answer for. She had watched her own roof inspection from her desk at work while I was standing on her ridge. It went fine. Then she asked where that video lives now and who else can watch it. I said something about the cloud and heard how weak it sounded coming out of my mouth. Secure inspection video sharing is the honest answer to her question, and it is not a logo on a website that says your data is safe. It is four specific decisions a tool makes on your behalf, whether or not anybody tells you about them.
I had to go learn what those decisions were before I could answer her. Here they are in the order they matter.
What secure inspection video sharing actually means
Encryption in transit is table stakes. Every product does it, nobody should get credit for it, and it answers none of the questions a homeowner is actually asking. The four that matter:
How long does the viewer link keep working. Where do the bytes sit when nobody is watching. What does it take to get one back out. Who inside your own company can pull up footage of a stranger's back yard on a Tuesday afternoon.
Ask a vendor those four and you learn a lot in about ninety seconds. Some of them have thought carefully about it. Some of them will tell you about their certifications, which is a different subject.
The viewer link ends when the walk ends
The link you text a homeowner is not a web address in the normal sense. It is not meant to keep working. When the inspector taps stop, the session closes and the link stops opening anything. If she forwards it to her brother an hour later, he gets nothing.
That sounds small until you think about where links actually go. A link to a marketing page can live forever and no harm done. A link to somebody's house should not still be sitting in a group text two years from now. I went through the whole life of one of those links in why an inspection link should expire.
The other half of the viewer side is that the connection only runs one direction. The homeowner receives video and audio. Her camera and microphone never turn on, because the viewer has no ability to send anything back. People brace for the permission prompts and then relax when the prompts never come. It also means nobody is accidentally broadcasting their kitchen to a roofer.
Where the recording sits when nobody is watching
Recordings go into private storage. Not a folder with link sharing switched on for anyone with the address, which is what most people mean when they say the file is in the cloud. Nothing is public. Nothing is indexed by a search engine. There is no URL you could arrive at by guessing or by incrementing a number at the end of somebody else's.
When a person who is allowed to watch asks to watch, the system cuts a signed URL on the spot. It works for a short window and then it does not work anymore. The key gets made when you ask for it and it expires on its own. Copy it, paste it in an email, and by the time somebody clicks it is already dead.
That is the difference between secure inspection video sharing and file sharing. File sharing hands out a permanent address and hopes nobody passes it around. This hands out a temporary one every single time.
Who is allowed to open it
Storage and links are the easy part. The harder question is a business one, and it is yours to answer: which of your people should be able to watch a recording of a customer's property, and for how long after the job closes.
My own answer got stricter over time. A salesperson who never went to that address does not need to scroll through the footage. The office needs enough access to do their job and no more. The homeowner keeps hers. I laid out how I think about the four groups in who should be able to see an inspection video, and the separate problem of handing footage to somebody outside the company in sharing with a third party.
What happens before the video starts
Before any of that, there is a recording notice, and it has to be acknowledged before video starts. Not a setting buried in preferences. Not a checkbox the app can quietly skip because the inspector is in a hurry and the ladder is not tied off. The server will not start video until the acknowledgment is recorded, which means it happens on the bad days too.
I built it that way because the alternative is trusting myself to remember, and I am on a roof. I say it out loud anyway. The software just makes sure it happened even when I forget. How I word it, and why I do not pretend to know what any state requires, is in telling people plainly that you are recording. That post is not legal advice and neither is this one. Recording rules vary a great deal from state to state. Ask a lawyer licensed where you work.
Where the security model stops
It does not make a bad inspection good. If you missed the soft decking in person you missed it on camera, and now there is a recording of you missing it.
It does not settle anything on the insurance side, and I want to be clear about that line because it matters. I document what I observed on the roof and describe condition in plain language while the camera is on it. I am a contractor, not a licensed public adjuster, and in most states that is not a technicality. If a claim is part of the homeowner's situation, that is between her and her insurer. What she has from me is a clean record of what her property looked like on a specific day, made while she watched.
And it does not replace judgment about who you let into your account. Software can enforce a rule. It cannot decide the rule is a good one.
If you want the mechanics instead of the summary, the security model page lays out link lifetime, storage, and access in one place, in about the same words I just used. Pricing is per job rather than per seat, which matters here because seat pricing quietly pushes companies toward shared logins, and a shared login is the fastest way to lose track of who watched what.
Read the security page before you read anything else. It is the part I would want to read if somebody else had built this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can watch my inspection video?
The people you send it to, and nobody else by accident. The live viewer link ends when the walk ends — it is not a permanent address. The recording afterwards sits behind access control rather than on a public URL, and opening it means being someone the account has named.
Does the viewer link expire?
Yes. It is good for the inspection it was created for and then it is done. That is deliberate: a link to somebody's property that works forever is a link that eventually reaches somebody they never chose to give it to.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.