Live Cams is an iPhone/iPod Touch security camera viewer. It was designed to allow owners of JPEG/MJPEG IP cameras to view and control their devices wherever they may be. During development it was noted that there were many publicly available cameras on the internet and they were compatible with the app. As a result Barry chose to include as many of them as he could find so that when you download the application it comes with a large sample set from across the world.
Live Cams was started in October 2008 and released on the App Store in February of 2009. By June of the same year it reached the #6 spot in the US, #2 in Canada and was a top 100 utility in 58 out of 62 countries where the app was sold.
Since that time Barry quit his full-time position as a software engineer for a large cable TV company (Comcast) and is now focused on producing high-quality releases of his products and supporting his large customer base (nearly 2.5 million users as of Dec 2011). Live Cams was the #1 top paid app in the US and Japanese app stores over the holiday season from December 2009 to January 2010.
Some facts about Live Cams:
- All connections for video are made directly to the IP address of the cameras from your iPhone/iPod/iPad.
- MJPEG and JPEG capable IP cameras are supported as long as they use HTTP protocols to deliver video
- PTZ enabled devices are also supported if they use HTTP requests for controlling the camera
- All video is live (not pre-recorded) unless the camera type is JPG. JPG cameras are merely links to images on a website. This content may be cached/old or it could be refreshed on an interval. We try not to include too many of these since they are not actually cameras but are just "soft-links" to the images.
- Locations of public cameras are pulled from the websites on which they were found. If this information was incorrect on the web then it will also be incorrect in Live Cams. We appreciate emails from users who know the true location of any cameras that are improperly listed.
- Public camera audio is not currently supported in Live Cams. Only a handful of public cameras have audio capabilities. Even those that do can only send a live audio stream to 1 or 2 users simultaneously, making it a waste of time to include.
- H264 and MPEG devices are not supported by Live Cams. The iPhone SDK lacks support for RTSP which is required to stream live video sources with these formats.
Live Cams HD
Here are some screenshots of Live Cams HD
