Stream Live Video from Your Home

by Lori Cunningham

Don’t you hate it when you find dishes on the counter and you ask which one of your kids left them out only to get the all too familiar reply, “not me”?  Or you find the TV left on…which apparently “not me” left on?  Are you curious what your dog or cat does all day… sit around or does s/he tend to get a little mischievous at times?

If you’re curious to find out, but don’t want to spend a fortune in surveillance cameras, Philips has come out with their In.Sight Wireless Home Monitor to help you capture some of these “Ahaaa”  moments.  I call them “Ahaaa” moments because that’s what you say when you find out who’s been not picking up after themselves!

In addition to checking up on your kids, there are numerous uses for video monitoring…

Possible Uses for the Philip’s In.Sight Camera:

• as a baby monitor to watch your hopefully sleeping baby
• at the front door to notify you when someone has entered the house
• in the family room/kitchen to observe your pooch
• upstairs in the hallway to keep an eye on your kids’ roughhousing when they think they’re out of view
• watching your kids do their homework while you’re in the other room
• watching your washer or dryer to see how many more minutes until your load is done
• watching your kids outside playing
• at a window at the front door to see who is arriving or if a package has been delivered
• at the back door, seeing which kids are going in and out…and discovering who forgot to close the door!
• at the back door while on vacation in case someone tries to get in
• if you’re selling your house, watch the Open House from your iPhone while away
• in the kitchen so your kids can wave to you while on a trip
• they say a watched pot never boils…but will it if you watching it using a Philips camera???

 Set Up

Setting up the Philips In.Sight monitor did not take long at all.  Just plug in the camera where you want it, download the free In.Sight app for the iPhone/iPhone and walk through the steps.  The app will ask you for the password to access your home network.  Once you type it in, it will generate a QR code which you put in front of the camera; this ensures the camera is secured on your network.  The camera itself connects wirelessly to your home network, but still needs to be plugged in.

The camera and base are rather unique.  Both pieces have a strong battery on them so you can attach them together, yet angle the camera easily in different ways.  In.Sight comes with both a resting base for a table or a mounting base to be mounted on a wall (upside down or right-side up), both of which have strong magnets.  The magnets allow the camera to be adjusted, even when mounted.  The In.Sight camera also comes with a very long power cord to help you get it plugged into an outlet.

Watching Your Video

You have two options to watch your video.

1.)  You can watch it live, which stays live for 5 minutes, then will shut off.  You can turn it back on as many times as you want through the day.

2.)  You can be alerted when the camera picks up sound or motion.  At this point, it will automatically record 30 seconds and post it to your Dropbox account.

I highly recommend that you get a Dropbox account which gives you free storage to access your  videos/pictures online.  Just yesterday alone I generated 63 MB of video and pictures for half a day.  I put the camera in the kitchen, so the Philips In.Sight automatically records a lot of video.  I periodically wipe out the old data out of Dropbox to make room for the new data.  One thing I found very useful was to download Dropbox onto my computer.  After downloading it, it becomes a folder in your Windows Explorer and it’s very easy to refer to your In.Sight videos/pictures.

You can also view your video/pictures from your browser, although I wasn’t able to get that to work.  I read comments from other people that it is not a functional as the app.

To ensure your privacy, In.Sight creates a unique encryption key every time it connects, so you needn’t worry about he neighbors down the street watching your baby sleep.  Up to 16 cameras can be attached to your app at one time and you can allow access to two other people – perhaps your husband/child/or babysitter.

The Philips In.Sight is available through Amazon for $129.99 plus free shipping.

A Mom’s Perspective

I remember 10 years ago, I bought a baby monitor with the money my friends generously gave me during my baby shower.  I looked for a top of the line monitor that provided the clearest video of my precious firstborn baby.  I ended up with a bulky 5-inch black and white monitor and a nice looking camera.  Of course, whenever I wanted to move to another room while my baby was sleeping, I had to unplug the monitor and plug it back into the next room.  The option of recording anything wasn’t even a thought back then.

Today, it’s pretty incredible the quality of the cameras, the ability to view in color, the motion/audio detection, and the mobility of today’s video monitoring…all this at a lower cost.  I don’t have any young babies in the house anymore, but I’m having fun finding new ways to use the In.Sight home monitor to give me more insight as to which kid is the “not me” I’ve been searching for!

How would you use the Philips In.Sight camera?

*  I was sent a Philips In.Sight video camera after learning more about it during the Consumer Electronics Show.  All opinions are my own.