Nest Cam Outdoor

Should You Subscribe to the Nest Aware Service?

Nest Aware is the paid cloud service that is offered for use with any Nest Cam home security camera.  For those that have already purchased their camera, this is the question that you will need to answer after your free 30-day trial is over.  All purchasers of a new Nest Cam get a free trial.  So you are now asking the question of should I subscribe to the Nest Aware Cloud Service? We’re going to cover what you get with the Nest Aware service, the cost and evaluate the overall value as well as alternatives. With a few minor exceptions, Nest … Read more

Nest Cam Troubleshooting Guide

After working with Nest Camera products for many years, we have run into a lot of issues and figured it would be worthwhile to document how we fixed it.  The process for fixing issues is the same for DropCam Pro and the original DropCam so if you have the predecessor to the Nest Cam, refer to this Nest Cam Troubleshooting tutorial. Nest Cam Offline This is likely the most common issue with a Nest Cam.  A message in the Nest app is the way you will know the camera is offline.  It means the app cannot communicate with the camera.  … Read more

How and Why to Integrate Nest with Skybell

It’s always nice to see two competitors collaborate to improve their mutual customer’s experience.  That’s exactly what Nest and SkyBell have done.  Today, we’ll discuss how and why to integrate Nest with SkyBell. Some Background Are these two companies really competitors?  Kind of.  SkyBell makes a few different video doorbells.  Nest makes everything except a video doorbell.  At least that was the case until they recently announced the Nest Hello Video Doorbell which is due to be released sometime in 2018.  It’s unclear what capabilities they will have nor how much it will cost.  Until then, integration of Nest with … Read more

How to Do a Factory Reset on a Nest Cam or DropCam Pro

Ever reach a point where there’s no hope in terms of your home security camera ever working properly?  Perhaps you received a used camera that someone else owned.  Recently reaching the point of despair on a DropCam Pro, it was time to do a factory reset.  Since documentation is sparse, we thought an article on how to do a factory reset on a Nest Cam or DropCam Pro would be worthwhile.  The same procedure also applies to the first generation DropCam and Nest Cam Outdoor. Background One of our DropCam Pro home security cameras stopped functioning.  Not sure why and … Read more

How to Make a Nest Cam Public

Most Nest Cam owners use their home security camera in private mode for personal viewing.  However, some like to have their Nest Cam for all to see.  So today, we discuss how to make a Nest Cam public.  In other words, anybody can see it. Making a Nest Cam public isn’t difficult to do.  However, be aware that public means public.  Anybody and anytime will be able to see the action.  We have seen some interesting public cameras and are a bit stumped on the logic of the owners for making their Nest Cam public.  More than one person has … Read more

How to Watch Nest Cam on a TV Screen

Always looking to do new stuff with a Nest Cam, I thought it would be fun to watch a Nest Cam on a TV screen.  Thinking about it, it’s not such a strange idea.  Watching video streams on a smartphone, especially for extended periods of time can get cumbersome. Watching a Nest Cam on a TV also begins to approach the functionality found on dedicated security cameras.  You can technically keep it going all day.  Just be mindful of bandwidth consumption.  Reading more and more lately about ISP bandwidth restrictions so don’t exceed the cap if you have one. So … Read more

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