The inspection finishes, the page tells you it has ended, and the link stops working. That part is abrupt by design. What is less obvious is that a recording of the whole thing now exists somewhere, and you probably have questions about where.
Here is the honest account, including the parts that are less convenient than you might hope.
The recording is not on the link you used
First and most important: the live link and the recording are two different objects. Closing the inspection kills the link. It does not delete anything.
This trips people up because the instinct is to save the text message and come back to it later. Do not bother. Twelve hours after it was created, or the moment the inspector ends the job, that URL serves nothing to anybody, including you. What the link your inspector texted you does sets out the expiry rules.
Where it goes
Recording starts on its own when the inspection goes live and stops when it ends. Nobody has to remember to press anything, which is the point — the recordings that go missing are almost always the ones somebody had to remember.
The file lands with the inspection company. Not on the inspector's phone, not in their personal cloud storage, not in a text thread. That distinction is worth more than it sounds. A video on one employee's phone leaves the company when that employee does, and I have watched somebody try and fail to retrieve a two-year-old walkthrough from a former colleague. A video held by the company survives the staffing.
It is stored privately. There is no public URL, nothing to guess, and nothing indexed. When an authorised person opens it, they get a link that works for a short period and then stops.
Who can open it
Inside the company, roughly: the inspector who did the job, and the owners and administrators of the business. Not every employee, and not other companies using the same software.
Outside the company, nobody, unless somebody deliberately creates a link to send out. That is the important asymmetry. Sharing is an act, not a default. There is no setting where a recording quietly becomes visible to a wider circle, because the wider circle is created one link at a time by a person who has to decide to do it.
The security page has the model written out properly.
Getting a copy
Ask. That is the mechanism.
What happens is that somebody at the company creates a share link for that specific recording and sends it to you. The link is time-limited — it works for a while and then expires — which is a nuisance if you sit on the email for a month and is exactly right otherwise. A permanent public link to video of the inside of somebody's house is not a thing that should exist.
Two practical suggestions. Ask early, while the job is fresh and the person who did it still remembers your name. And watch it once when it arrives, before the link expires, so you know it shows what you think it shows.
If you want to keep it indefinitely, say so and download the file when the link is live. Which brings us to the part people do not expect.
It does not last forever
Recordings are kept on a schedule, and the schedule depends on which plan the company is on. The common windows are ninety days, one year, and three years. After that the file is deleted on purpose, which is the correct behaviour — video of the inside of your house sitting on a server indefinitely is not a favour to anybody — but it does mean that "I will get a copy eventually" is not a plan.
Ninety days is the shortest of those, and it is shorter than most people imagine. If you think there is any chance you will want this video, ask for a copy in the first week and keep it yourself.
There is more on how contractors think about these windows in how long to keep inspection photos, written to them rather than to you, which is why it is worth reading.
What the recording is good for
Three things, in roughly descending order of how often they matter.
Showing somebody who was not there. A spouse at work, a sibling handling a parent's house, a business partner. They get the walk itself rather than your summary of it, and the difference in how a conversation goes is large.
Getting a second opinion without a second visit. You can send the recording to another tradesperson and have them look at the same footage. They will usually still want to see it in person before quoting, and they should, but it is a fast way to find out whether the first account was reasonable.
Remembering what was said. Six months later, "he said the flashing had a couple of years in it" is a memory. The recording is not.
What it is not good for
It is not a substitute for being told things in writing. If a decision came out of the inspection — repair this, wait on that, do not walk on the north slope — get it in an email too. Nobody scrubs through thirty minutes of video to find a sentence.
And it is a record of what one person observed on one day with a phone camera. It shows what the lens was pointed at. It does not show the things nobody looked at, which is why what to ask while the inspector is up there puts "what did you not get to" on the list.
If you want the whole sequence, from the text message to the stored file, the how it works page lays it out.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.