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Synology camera apps compared

Updated September 2026

Six well-known apps can put a camera on your television. Five of them show you live video and nothing else. This page compares what each one actually does with a Synology NAS, including the places where the other apps win.

The six apps

Every one of these is a real, maintained product with a large install base. Prices and details were checked in September 2026.

Side by side

App icons are the property of their publishers and are shown here to identify each product. NasCam is an independent app and is not affiliated with Synology, Google, Home Assistant, Alexey Vasilyev or Robert Chou.

What each one is good at

Synology DS cam

DS cam is free, official, and better than NasCam at the things a phone is for. It sends push notifications, it drives PTZ cameras, and it plays recordings. What it has never had is a television build. There is no tvOS version, and no Android TV version; a request thread for one has been open on the Synology community forum since 2019. On an Android TV box DS cam does not appear in the Play Store at all, because it carries no leanback launcher. People who sideload the phone APK end up driving it with a mouse-toggle utility, one simulated cursor step at a time.

tinyCam Monitor PRO

tinyCam is the app most Android camera owners land on, and it deserves the reputation. Over 350 vendors, 17 layouts, two-way audio, PTZ, recording to Dropbox or Nextcloud, a proper TV interface with picture-in-picture, and it runs on Fire TV too. It costs $3.99 once and it is still updated.

It also supports Synology, but only in one direction. tinyCam's own supported-devices list shows Surveillance Station as "Surveillance Station (jpeg)" and "Surveillance Station API (mjpeg, ptz)". Those are live paths. tinyCam's archive player plays back the clips tinyCam recorded itself, on its own storage, not the recordings sitting in Surveillance Station.

IP Cam Viewer Pro

This is the other veteran, and the only app here besides NasCam that ships on both Apple TV and Android TV. It claims more than 800 camera and DVR models, and it does things no one else on this page does, like switching a relay to open a garage door. Its Record Mode turns a spare device into a small NVR of its own.

It reaches a Synology camera the generic way, through a stream URL you paste in per camera. That means no Surveillance Station sign-in, no camera list, and no access to what the NAS recorded.

HA TV Dashboard

If you already run Home Assistant, this one is free with no paid tier and does something none of the others do. It puts your dashboard on the TV, streams several camera feeds at once, and pops a camera up in a corner when a motion sensor fires, over whatever you were watching. Nothing else here does that.

Home Assistant reaches Synology cameras as live camera entities. It is a home automation surface, so what you get is the current picture and the sensor state. Browsing yesterday's recordings is not what it is for.

Google Home and Nest

The easiest of the lot. "Hey Google, show me the front door on the living room TV" works with no app to configure. It is on the list because many people expect it to be the answer. It speaks only to Nest cameras, and it cannot see a Synology NAS.

The hardware answer

Synology's own way to put cameras on a screen is Local Display over HDMI, and that runs only on Synology NVR and VisualStation hardware, never on the DiskStation DS-series most people own. We compared the cost of that route against a VisualStation and against a long HDMI run on their own pages.

The gap nobody else fills

The recorded event history column has one Yes on a television, and that is the reason NasCam exists.

There is a technical reason for that. A live picture comes out of the camera, so any app that can open an RTSP or MJPEG stream can show it. Recordings do not live in the camera. They live in Surveillance Station on the NAS, indexed by event, with motion and AI detections attached to them, and reaching them means signing in with a DSM account and talking to the Surveillance Station API. That is a Synology-specific piece of work, and an app built to support 350 brands has little reason to do it for one of them. The longer explanation is here.

NasCam only supports Synology, so it did that work. You sign in with your DSM account, the cameras appear as a list rather than a pile of URLs, and each camera's day is a scrubbable timeline with its motion and person detections marked on it. Since September 2026 it does this on Android TV as well as Apple TV, with the same layout and the same D-pad handling.

We recheck this claim. If you find a TV app that plays Surveillance Station recordings and is not on this page, tell us and we will add it.

What NasCam gives up

Four of these apps beat NasCam at something, and it is cheaper to read that here than to find out after installing.

• No motion alerts. NasCam sends no notifications on either platform. On Apple TV no app can; tvOS has no push capability at all. DS cam on your phone is the right tool for that, and running both costs nothing.
• No PTZ control. DS cam, tinyCam and IP Cam Viewer all pan, tilt and zoom. NasCam does not, in this version.
• No two-way audio. tinyCam does this. NasCam does not.
• Synology only. If your cameras are on a Reolink NVR, a UniFi Protect setup, Frigate or Blue Iris, NasCam cannot help you and tinyCam probably can.
• No phone app. NasCam runs on televisions. There is no iPhone or Android phone version.

Which one to install

• Cameras from several brands, one live wall on an Android TV: tinyCam Monitor PRO.
• You want a garage door relay or PTZ on an Apple TV: IP Cam Viewer Pro.
• You already run Home Assistant: HA TV Dashboard, and it is free.
• Nest cameras: Google Home, and nothing else needed.
• Alerts on your phone while you are out: DS cam. Keep it whatever else you install.
• Synology Surveillance Station, and you want to sit down and go through what was recorded: NasCam.

These are not exclusive. The common setup among NasCam users is DS cam on the phone for the alert and NasCam on the TV for the look. They read the same Surveillance Station, so there is nothing to keep in sync.

Questions