Ten brackets and nineteen megabits.
There is no fibre past the yard, no camera operator, and no control room. Six cameras on wired ethernet, four on 4G and a solar panel, and a stamped still whenever any of that fails.
The whole system, in five parts.
-
The bracket is the only creative decision.
Every camera here is fixed. No pan, no tilt, no zoom available to anybody outside the farm office. That means the framing chosen on the day the bracket went up is the framing for the next several years, and there is no fixing it later with a joystick.
The rule for choosing an angle is short. It points at this farm. It points at something that genuinely happens rather than something that photographs well. And it points at nothing that belongs to anybody else.
A fixed camera is a promise. A moveable one is a negotiation you have every day.
-
Six wired, four on 4G, four on solar.
The yard, the grain store, the lambing shed, the brewery, the pub pass and the beehive run on wired ethernet back to a switch in the farm office. Those six are the reliable ones.
The hop yard, the hedgerow, the big field and the gate are too far for cable. They run over a 4G bridge, and three of them run off a panel and a leisure battery. That is why the field cameras are the ones that drop out in December: a solar panel at fifty-two degrees north in the last week of the year is close to decorative.
-
Nineteen megabits is the ceiling on everything.
Total upstream across the whole estate is about nineteen megabits on a good day. Ten cameras share it. That arithmetic is why nothing here is 4K and why the two least-watched feeds run at 720p rather than 1080p.
A higher resolution would look better for the four people on fibre and would break the feed for everybody else. We would rather have ten cameras that work than three that are beautiful.
-
Ninety-nine per cent, measured in minutes.
The commitment is ninety-nine per cent uptime across a rolling ninety-day window, measured as the proportion of minutes in which a live stream was actually served. Not the proportion of days on which the system was broadly fine.
Ninety-nine per cent is about twenty-two hours a year with no live picture. The worst camera on the estate — the big field, on solar — sits at 97.8%, which is nearly two hundred hours. We publish both numbers on the camera pages rather than an average that hides the bad one.
Ninety-nine per cent uptime is twenty-two hours a year of nothing. Better said now than discovered in March.
-
The fallback is a still, not a spinner.
When a stream is unavailable the page serves the last good frame, stamped with the minute it was taken and the reason the feed stopped. Cable cut, power gone, camera offline, or simply out of season.
A loading spinner tells you nothing and a black rectangle tells you less. A stamped still from eleven minutes ago tells you exactly what you need to know, and on the hedgerow camera it is genuinely difficult to tell the difference.
The specification, in full.
Cameras
- Count
- 10All fixed. No public pan, tilt or zoom.
- Wired
- 6Yard, lambing shed, brewery, pub pass, beehive, weighbridge.
- 4G bridge
- 4Hop yard, hedgerow, big field, gate.
- Solar powered
- 3Hop yard, big field, gate.
- Highest mount
- 6.5 mThe pole at the top of the big field.
- Lowest mount
- 0.9 mThe beehive, ninety centimetres from a landing board.
Stream
- Resolution
- 1080p on eight, 720p on two
- Frame rate
- 25 fps throughout
- Bitrate
- 1.4 to 2.6 Mbps a camera
- Total upstream
- ~19 MbpsThe hard ceiling on everything above.
- Audio
- NoneOn any camera. This is a permanent decision.
- Latency
- 8 to 20 secondsIt is a farm, not an auction.
Availability
- Commitment
- 99% rolling 90 days
- Measured as
- Minutes with a live stream served
- Best camera
- 99.7% — the hedgerow
- Worst camera
- 97.8% — the big field, on solar
- Fallback
- Last good frame, stamped
- Planned work
- Announced on the offline page, never silently
These are the platform’s own figures for this build. Where a number is a design target rather than a measurement, the camera page says so.
What breaks, how often, and what you see instead.
| Failure | How often | What the page shows |
|---|---|---|
| 4G congestion | Weekly, briefly | A still from the last minute, and a quiet note |
| Solar shortfall, December | Most days for an hour or two | A still, and the time the panel expects to catch up |
| Camera offline | A few times a year | A still, the reason, and an estimate |
| Planned maintenance | Quarterly | Announced beforehand, with the window |
| Out of season | By design | A still and the date the camera comes back |
| Total estate outage | Twice since launch | The offline page, and a note on every camera |
Four things this rig will not do.
No control room
Nobody operates these. They point where they point.
No audio
Not muted by default. Not fitted.
No neighbours
Every angle checked against the boundary before the bracket went on.
No spinners
A stamped still, or nothing.
The technical questions.
Because ten cameras share about nineteen megabits of upstream and 4K would let three of them work beautifully while the other seven failed. Resolution is the easiest thing to promise and the first thing to break.
Eight to twenty seconds, depending on the camera and your connection. Cutting that would mean a more expensive delivery path for something nobody is betting on. It is a hedge, not a horse race.
No. Not at any membership tier and not for any amount of money. A camera anybody can move is a camera that eventually gets moved somewhere it should not point.
Stills are kept and published in the archive. Continuous footage is held for seven days on the farm office recorder and then overwritten, which is covered in the rules.
What happens when it all falls over.
The offline page, which is the most-visited page in this section in the last week of December.
Pestering, at your invitation
We named the newsletter after the imposition so that opting in means something. Unsubscribe in one click and we will not chase you.
