We designed Nest Cam to plug into a standard indoor or outdoor power outlet so it can stream and record video continuously. Other battery-powered cameras can’t do this because they’re asleep most of the time. To preserve battery life, they only turn on when they sense motion. That delay means important footage might not get recorded. Pick the wrong motion sensitivity setting, and it might not record what you want at all.

Not Nest Cam. Whenever it’s on and connected to Nest servers, it’s recording. You don’t have to worry about your camera turning on too late to catch the beginning of an event, or turning off when it thinks the event is over. With Nest Aware, you can go back and see the whole story, and everything that happened before and after.

Nest Cam’s cloud-based algorithms will do the work for you: when something important happens, you can get an alert. If you’re using an Android phone, there will be a thumbnail of the activity to help you decide whether you want to watch the video.

With Nest Aware, you’ll know when your camera saw a person

As a subscriber to Nest Aware, you’ll get a special alert when your camera thinks it has spotted a person, and on Android phones the alert includ es a cropped close-up of the person. Simply tap the alert to go to the Nest app to review what the person was doing. And if you want to know what happened before they showed up, or what happened after they left, it’s easy to jump to any point in your video history and start watching.

Nest Cam makes it easy to find the footage that matters

When you subscribe to Nest Aware, your camera’s 10-day or 30-day video history is one continuous timeline that you can swipe through. Even if you had alerts turned off, it’s easy to see exactly when something happened, and quickly find any activities you missed. Swipe through thumbnails showing each event, and tap the thumbnail to watch the footage.

Capture memories and share clips

With Nest Aware, you can place your camera in a spot with a lot of day-to-day family activity, and have it capture unexpected moments like a child’s first steps, or your dog doing a backflip. You can download video clips of any footage you want to keep and share. You can also create a time lapse that compresses an entire day into a few minutes, which is not possible with battery-powered cameras that are turned off most of the time.

You can turn off recording whenever you want

If you don’t want your camera to record video all the time, you don’t have to. With Home/Away Assist, you can have your Nest Cam detect your phone’s location and automatically turn off when you come home. Or, you can set a daily schedule if you want it to turn on and off at specific times. You can always turn it off manually too. When it’s off, it won’t be recording, so you’ll see a gap in your video history.