If your local network itself is exposed to the internet anyway a regular old webcam or netcam does not depend on a 3rd party, but it is generally intended to be

If your local network itself is exposed to the internet anyway a regular old webcam or netcam does not depend on a 3rd party, but it is generally intended to be accessed from anywhere in the world. According to your own preferences, so you would then need to make the effort to have the security settings on your own private cam servers here, so that only those authorized to view, locally or elsewhere, will get anything at all. In addition you will generally be required to make very specific efforts to set up a "pinhole" in your ISP gateway firewall if you want to allow any non-local access to that stream to begin with. By default broadband ISPs have not intended to make local streams accessible to the web otherwise. A webcam is plugged into a PC which will need to run some streaming software like today's OBS Studio (or the discontinued Windows Media Encoder, then Expresion Encoder, which were free downloads for earlier versions of Windows). So the PC with the webcam/microphone functions as a simple network media server. You can have your own unique firewall and security settings for this one PC. You will also choose the encoding format for the stream, and the way your authorized viewing workstations will need to be securley logged in, and they will have to have the proper corresponding media codec installed for them to be able to display the stream. Laptops can broadcast this live streaming with no additional hardware. A netcam will just plug right into your router (or be wireless) and it will contain its own simple secure network media server, so it does not require its own PC with encoding app, to accomplish the equivalent 24/7 streaming. You still need a local or remote computer's media player to view the video stream and a browser to access the netcam's administrative interface.