It is 23:40 and something clatters outside. You open the camera app and get a page of still pictures, some of them an hour old, and you tap them one at a time, waiting for each to load. By the time the side gate is playing, whatever it was has gone.
That is how a lot of camera apps work, and it is not because your phone cannot cope. It comes down to where the video goes.
Why most apps show stills, or one camera at a time
A subscription camera usually sends its picture to the maker's servers, and your phone fetches it from there. Streaming every camera to every phone all the time would cost the company a great deal of bandwidth, so the app shows a snapshot for each camera and starts the live picture only when you tap one.
A traditional CCTV recorder does show a proper grid, but usually on one monitor in one room, with its own app, and a separate system again for the alarm.
What a live grid of every camera needs
Seeing every camera live at the same moment is a job for something in the house, close to the cameras. In the homes we fit, that is the hub. The cameras send their video to it over your own network, it records them, and your phone watches them from it without a trip out to the internet and back.
The grid is only as good as 3 things:
Cameras with a standard video stream. Most wired cameras and many Wi-Fi ones have one, including Tapo, Reolink, Hikvision, Dahua and Amcrest. Cloud-only cameras cannot send their picture to a hub in your house, so they cannot join the grid.
A hub with the muscle for it. Ours has 4 cores and 16 GB of memory, enough to record every camera and serve the grid at the same time.
Decent Wi-Fi where you watch. In a weak corner of the house the picture quietly switches to a lighter stream instead of freezing, and goes back to sharp when it can. Cameras that are off the screen stop pulling data, so the Wi-Fi is spent on what you are looking at.
For any view that really matters, a wired camera is the safer choice. A cable does not drop out when the Wi-Fi is busy.
What you see, and where
Open the app and every camera is already playing, side by side. Each tile is live and moving, not a still that refreshes every so often.
Tap one for full screen, live, with sound. The last frame shows while the live picture connects, so you are never staring at a black box.
Double-tap any spot on the picture to look closer at it, then drag to look around.
The grid is the same on every phone, tablet and computer in the house, and on the wall panel by the door if you have one.
The Home screen keeps the cameras in view with the latest sighting underneath, such as "Person at Driveway, 3 min ago".
With a TV that can take a camera stream, a couple of taps puts a camera on the big screen when the doorbell goes in the middle of a film.
Every camera at the same moment, looking back
Live is only half the story. When something has happened, you want to see it from every angle at once.
Drag back through the day on a camera's timeline and the picture holds wherever you stop. Tick Sync all cameras and every camera shows that same moment, side by side, so you can follow someone from the gate to the front door. Play it at half speed to catch a face, or at 4 times speed to get through a quiet afternoon.
The event list says what happened in plain English, "A person at the front door, 13:02", with the picture and the clip, and you can download the clip if you need it as evidence.
One honest limit: the live grid is for when you are at home, on your own network. Away from home, alerts reach your phone wherever you are, but live viewing from outside the home is not part of the system.
How to get it
Send us a photo of each camera you already have, or of the spots where you would like one, on WhatsApp. We will tell you which join as they are and which we would replace, and give you a fixed price in writing. Every camera records at home, around the clock if you like, on up to 1 TB, and there is nothing to pay each month.