Why can't I view the live stream of the Tapo camera continuously?

Note: Always ensure the camera firmware is up-to-date and you are running the latest Tapo app on your phone.

Some customers may want to view the live stream of the Tapo camera all the time in some circumstances, for example, you want to monitor your little baby simultaneously when you are busy in preparing the dinner for your family. We may say, generally, YES, you can live stream the camera continuously, just make certain both your monitoring phone and the camera are connected to the same wireless network and ensure the signal on them are good as well.

However, some customers may realize that they can not watch the camera live stream continuously and they were prompted to continue the viewing after several minutes. There are some settings you need to verify within your network:

• Confirm and ensure both your monitoring phone and the camera are connected to your home Wi-Fi. You can disable the cellular data on the phone if necessary.
• If your monitoring phone and the camera are connected to the same Wi-Fi, but you are still getting the prompted to continue message on the Tapo app, check and ensure there is no special setting on your host router, such as AP isolation or firewall that blocked the local communication between the camera and your phone;
• If your monitoring phone and the camera are connected to different Wi-Fi networks, which means you are viewing the camera remotely. In this circumstance, the camera live stream needs to be uploaded to the TP-Link Cloud server first and your phone then downloads and plays it. Upon this point, continuous live streaming strains your network bandwidth, and it might cause data allowance overages, which is also inconsistent with the advocacy of energy conservation, so there will be a time limitation for the live streaming and you will be prompted to continue the viewing. To resume the stream, simply press YES/CONTINUE again.
• If you are using a third-party device such as Google Home Hub, Echo Show, or fire TV to watch the live stream of the Tapo camera, it will be disconnected automatically when it arrives at a certain minute as it’s a Cloud-to-Cloud service which will strain your network bandwidth more and cause more data allowance overages. If you want to continue watching, take the Echo show as an example, you need to ask it to show again by voice command "Alexa, show me the [Camera Name]".

Tapo cameras won’t miss any action, even when you aren’t there to view the stream. Features like local recording with a microSD card, motion detection notifications, and Alarms that all the action in your camera’s field of view is recorded.