There are a number of reason why the cam is not on. Firstly and most importantly is privacy. Sometimes we prefer you not to be able to see us. So at those times we simply turn the camera off. Secondly you might be behind a firewall. Your place of work might not allow you to view streaming webcam pictures. It may be that there is a problem with your server or our server. In that case there is very little we can do but wait until everything is back up and working again, but this is very rare. You may have a problem with your own PC. Make sure you have your permissions set correctly in Internet Options to allow you to view Javascript. There may be a problem with our internet connection. We are on broadband ADSL but it does occassionally go down. Finally, I guess we may just have turned our PC off. The camera will obviously not be able to send pictures to the website if the PC is turned off.

We use iVista's Inetcam software. It's not free but it seems to be the best in that price range for live webcam streaming. It's quite easy to set up and it installs a web server on your computer so the pictures are actually broadcast direct from our home pc.