AirBeam App Review

What is it?

AirBeam; It turns your iPod touch, iPhone or iPad into video surveillance equipment. And it works automatically without needing you to configure anything! Now you don’t need to buy that expensive video surveillance equipment you wanted to install. But let’s be clear; AirBeam was designed for when YOU are on premises and connected to your own WiFi network (But with advanced router setup you can use it remotely also).

Why Do You Need This?

If you parent a child with special needs, as I do, you know that sometimes you need to know what they’re up to. And you can’t always be in the room with them. Here’s what I’ve done; I startup AirBeam on my iPod Touch, put it in camera mode, and conveniently place it somewhere in my son’s room with the video camera facing the proper direction. Then I grab the iPad, start up the AirBeam app, sit down with a bag of chips and watch the show. My son has autism and sometimes I want to know what he’s doing when he’s alone in his room.

What Features Does it Have?

AirBeam is most useful if you own at least 2 iDevices OR 1 iDevice and a Mac. I don’t think it’s uncommon for families to have more than one iPhone. But even if you only have an iPhone and a Windows PC, you can utilize the iPhone as the camera and your PC as the monitor. AirBeam is crazy flexible! And they have a free app available for the Mac which gives you control of everything from the monitor side.

Features? It has a couple of those.

• ZERO CONFIGURATION REQUIRED!
• High Definition video (you can hear the audio too!)
• Web interface so you can watch video on any computer using your browser
• Motion and audio detection
• Record video & audio
• Remotely activate the flash light on your ‘camera’ device
• Film with an iPhone and watch the live video on your iPad
OR
• Film with your iPad and watch the video on your iPhone
OR
• Film with your iPod touch and watch the video on your computer
OR…
• You get where I’m going with this?

How Does it Work?

Let’s take this from the top. Install AirBeam on 2 iDevices. For the sake of argument let’s say you’re installing it on an iPhone and also an iPad. Once installed, open the app.

AirBeam automatically opens in “monitor mode” on both devices and immediately starts searching for an open install of AirBeam in “camera mode.” Since your 2 devices are both in monitor mode, you should switch one of them to camera mode by touching the little camera icon in the lower left corner.

As soon as you switch one of them to camera mode, the other device finds it and automatically starts displaying the video footage and feeding you the audio. Boom! That’s it!

On the other hand, if you only have 1 iDevice, start it up and get AirBeam rolling. Put it in camera mode. When in that mode the screen shows a little sentence on top of the screen in green. It says something like “Browser Access: http://192.168.1.15”.

On your computer you open up your web browser (i.e. FireFox, Safari, Internet Explorer) and type that number into your address bar. In the example above you’d type in “192.168.1.15” and hit enter. Boom! You’re viewing the AirBeam video. That’s it.