Adequate protection of underwater habitats requires observations and studies of the affected areas over an extended period of time. Such observations may be conducted by humans (divers) or by robots, al- though their presence may affect the behaviour of the observed animals. The overall aim of this paper was to construct an underwater camera using available components and to evaluate its general applicability. The developed software enables the generation of two distinct video streams: one for local recording and another for embedding in a single-page ap- plication that also contains controls for modifying the camera settings from any location with an Internet connection. In addition to the video streams, the camera’s status is accessible via a public interface, facilitating predictive maintenance through a service hosted by a cloud service provider. Using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components, the camera took 7.25 hours to build, resulting in a total cost of 349.62 EUR.