Malcolm Owen
Alphabet's Nest is rolling out updates to its Nest Aware cloud platform and its iOS app, updating notifications with a preview of Nest Cam feeds before entering the app, as well as the ability to automatically detect doors within a camera's view.
Subscribers to the Nest Aware service will see a thumbnail image from the Nest Cam feed in alerts, triggered by the camera detecting motion. Nest Cam owners running iOS 10 or later on their iPhone or iPad will see an animated preview of a saved Nest Cam video clip in the alert, indicating to users what the full clip will show when the app is opened.
Owners of Nest Protect will also benefit from the Nest Cam alert updates. If Nest Protect detects dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, or the presence of smoke, the app will now automatically show live feeds for all nearby Nest Cams, showing how much smoke there is, possible causes, and if anyone or anything is in danger.
As part of the same Nest Aware update, the cloud service can detect if doors are visible within feeds from the Nest Cam and Nest Cam Outdoor. The service will learn to recognize doors in the home from monitoring the live feed, and automatically set an "activity zone" around the door, though users have the option to remove it through the app.
Users have been able to assign activity zones to areas of a camera's view for quite some time, by drawing a box over parts of the image that are of interest, such as valuables or entry points, with alerts able to be sent whenever motion is detected in the region.
Nest aims to roll out the improved notifications and door detection features to paid subscribers of the Nest Aware cloud-based video archival service over the next few weeks.
In a previous update, Nest allowed users to stream Nest Cam feeds to the fourth-generation Apple TV. At the same time, users were provided the ability to create short videos from captured footage, which can then be shared online.
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
4 Comments
As cameras become normal everywhere and machine intelligence leads to artificial intelligence, it should eventually become impossible to go or do anything without it being known or recorded. On top of all of that, There's Facebook and Instagram...
But have you seen the price of the subscription?
10-day retention $100 per year for a single cam
Additional cameras $50 per year
30-day retention $300 per year for a single cam
Additional cameras $150 per year
If you have two homes in your Nest Account, the first Nest Aware subscription purchased for a camera in each home will be full price.
For just 2 cameras in a house if you want 30-day retention that is an eye-watering $450 per year subscription...they should be giving the cameras away at that rate!
By way of comparison Canary offers 30-day subscription for $99 per year for a single device or $149 for up to 3 devices and $49 per each additional device.
I want to use cameras like this (not Nest tho), but I won't get roped into monthly/annual contracts for the storage, when I have tons of cloud storage already allocated to me. These bozos need to stop trying to rent me HD space and figure out a way to use what I already have, then I'll buy their stuff.
We have a few Nest cameras in the house (as baby monitors), but my system is based around a refurbished Mac Mini, running Security Spy by Ben's Software, a PoE injector/router, connected to PoE 3MP HD Hikvision cameras. Security Spy saves captured events into a DropBox folder on the Mac, which are promptly uploaded. Initial investment of mac, cameras, wiring and router was about 1000.00, or two ½ years of Nest Aware for the amount of cameras we have around the property. Also, because only events are saved and uploaded, there's not a constant hog on upload speed going on.