The following is a fair and impartial review request of the website and service of Home Camera.
Home camera is an in-home surveillance camera that is free to use during beta testing. If you have done research on home surveillance, you would know that those advanced equipment do not come cheap. With Home Camera, however, you do not need to buy additional equipment because all you need to do is to install the software to your Windows PC or laptop like any other software and hook up a webcam.
Turn the program on and start monitoring anywhere you like after you have named your camera. I find that the easiest way to name your camera is the room that you re monitoring, like living room, baby room, dining room or kitchen. This is to avoid confusion because you can connect a total of four webcams or CCTV cameras.
Once everything is set up, you can then access your cameras remotely from any internet enabled computer, laptop, PDA or mobile phone. With Home Camera, though, you can also opt to share your surveillance cameras with other Home Camera users. Perhaps you will be away without an internet connection and would like your siblings to keep an eye on the house and pets, or share your children’s moments with the grandparents so this is a great feature and can be easily implemented by granting access to specific users.
Personally, Home Camera is perfect for me because I have a dog which suffers from seizures. He lapses into fits and it is especially bad during a storm because he suddenly developed a fear for the rain and lightning and of course the sound of thunder terrifies him. This is especially frustrating for me because I live in Malaysia where it rains almost every day. You can imagine that I have to stay with my dog for hours daily.
My friend has advised me to keep him in a room all by himself and asked me to stay away to retrain him but I can’t let him inside without checking on him every other minute in case he hurts himself in a bout of fits. I went to check out the prices of surveillance equipment and they cost me an arm and a leg. Seriously, I could not afford them even if I could reclaim my freedom. That was why I kept putting it off while my dog continues to cling to me almost every day.
While Home Camera is the perfect tool for me thanks to its motion detection and automated recording where I can access the video or images that are automatically stored on the server of Home Camera or emailed to me, I know that Home Camera would also be perfect for people who are dependent on foreign maids to care for their children. We have read enough horror stories of how kids end up physically and mentally abused by these maids or even died the hands of these maids from hell. With these cameras well hidden at strategic parts of the home, the maids would not even realize that they are being watched.
Aside from the fact that this is a free service for the time being, and users who register during Beta testing will have a FREE Home Camera Lite account for life even after the service is commercialized, the plus points of Home Camera compared to other home surveillance services are its user-friendliness and intuitive interface plus the fact that we can use out existing computer and webcams without forking out thousands of dollars just setting up the remote monitoring system.