If you’ve ever tried to check a traffic camera before a road trip, peek at a beach webcam to plan your weekend, or watch a volcano feed just because it’s cool: you’ve probably run into the same frustrating pattern. The camera exists. The feed is technically public. But the site showing it wants you to sign up, pay a subscription, or sit through a wall of ads before you can see a single frame.
That’s exactly the kind of access barrier we care about at Remove Paywalls, and it’s why we’re excited to tell you about OpenCCTV.org.
What Is OpenCCTV?
OpenCCTV is the world’s largest free public camera network. It aggregates over 160,000 live cameras across 65+ countries into a single interactive map. You open the site, browse the map or search for a location, click a marker, and instantly see the live feed. No account required. No subscription. No paywall.
The cameras span a huge range of categories: traffic and road cameras, beach webcams, weather stations, volcano monitors, airport feeds, ski resort cams, nature and wildlife cameras, port and harbor views, satellite imagery, and even observatory feeds. If there’s a publicly accessible camera pointed at something interesting, there’s a good chance OpenCCTV has already indexed it.
Why Does This Matter?
Most of these camera feeds are already public. State departments of transportation publish traffic camera images. National weather services maintain weather station webcams. Government open data portals serve up live feeds for anyone to access. The problem isn’t that the data is hidden, it’s that it’s scattered across hundreds of different agencies, websites, and APIs, each with its own interface and quirks.
What typically fills that gap are commercial aggregators: sites like Surfline (for surf cams), HDOnTap, or various traffic camera apps, that take these free public feeds, wrap them in a proprietary player, and charge you a monthly fee to watch them. You end up paying for access to something your tax dollars already funded.
OpenCCTV takes a different approach. It pulls from 309 different source modules: US state DOTs, Canadian provincial highway systems, European transport agencies, Asian government feeds, global webcam APIs, scientific research networks, and presents them all in one clean, free, searchable interface. Every camera gets a shareable short link (like opencctv.org/cam/12345), so you can bookmark your favorite feeds or send them to someone without them needing to navigate anything.
The Coverage Is Genuinely Impressive
Here’s a rough breakdown of what OpenCCTV currently indexes:
- United States: ~60,000 cameras across 49 states plus DC, pulled from ArcGIS services, 511 systems, Caltrans, NYCDOT, and many more state DOT feeds
- Canada: ~6,000 cameras covering all 10 provinces and 2 territories, including DriveBC, Ontario 511, Quebec MTQ, and Alberta 511
- Europe: ~15,000 cameras from sources like Traffic England, Spain’s DGT, SkylineWebcams, Feratel, Panomax, SwissWebcams, and Nordic transport APIs
- Asia: ~15,000 cameras including Japan’s river monitoring network, Taiwan’s extensive highway system, Singapore LTA, Hong Kong Transport, and more
- Nature and science: ~3,000 cameras from ALERTWildfire, PhenoCam, zoos, aquariums, and observatories
- Space and satellite: Live imagery from GOES, Himawari, EUMETSAT, and NASA EPIC
Free Access to Live Cameras: The Paywall Problem in Webcam Sites
This is where OpenCCTV really aligns with what we do at Remove Paywalls. The webcam and live camera space is riddled with artificial access barriers.
Want to check surf conditions? Surfline charges $99.99/year for HD camera access. Want to watch traffic cameras in a clean interface? Most apps are loaded with ads or require in-app purchases. Want to browse nature cams? Many sites gate their best feeds behind premium tiers.
And yet the underlying camera feeds are often completely free and publicly funded. The value these paid services add is aggregation and a nice UI, but it shouldn’t mean that free public camera feeds become effectively paywalled for everyday users.
OpenCCTV provides that same aggregation and clean interface without any paywall. It’s an open-source project that treats public data as what it is: public. No login walls, no premium tiers, no “watch 3 cameras free then pay for more” schemes. Just an open map with 160,000+ live feeds.
How to Use OpenCCTV
Using the site is straightforward:
- Visit opencctv.org
- Browse the interactive map or use the search bar to find cameras by city, state, country, or name
- Click any marker to see the live feed
- Share any camera with its permanent short link
The map uses marker clustering, so dense areas like major metro highway systems don’t overwhelm you with pins, you zoom in and the clusters break apart into individual cameras. There’s also a scrolling thumbnail strip that shows live previews, making it easy to scan through nearby cameras quickly.
Who Is This For?
Honestly, almost anyone:
- Commuters checking highway conditions before heading out
- Travelers previewing destinations, checking beach and ski conditions, or monitoring weather at their next stop
- Weather enthusiasts tracking storms, watching volcano activity, or observing atmospheric conditions in real time
- Researchers and educators who need access to live environmental monitoring feeds
- Curious people who just enjoy watching the world – a harbor in Norway, a volcano in Iceland, a highway interchange in Tokyo
The point is that live camera feeds are a genuinely useful public resource, and they shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls when the cameras themselves are publicly operated and funded.
The Bottom Line
OpenCCTV is doing for live cameras what we try to do for online content more broadly – making freely available information actually free to access. No paywalls, no signups, no premium tiers. Just 160,000+ public cameras on an open map, available to anyone with a browser.
Check it out at opencctv.org.