French smart home manufacturer Netatmo was one of the first announced to support Apple's upcoming HomeKit Secure Video standard when it launches this fall, and now we know what cameras from the company will be receiving the new storage and encryption feature.
Apple featured Netatmo's logo prominently on stage at its annual developer conference alongside Eufy and Logitech as launch partners for HomeKit Secure Video. The new feature will allow HomeKit security cameras to locally encrypt video and then store it in Apple's own iCloud servers where it is out of reach of prying eyes.
Netatmo has revealed that the upcoming Smart Video Doorbell will support HomeKit Secure Video at its launch later this year and both the Smart Indoor Camera and Smart Outdoor Camera will support the feature as a free automatic firmware update soon after.
Users have been clamoring for this feature for some time. Currently, they must rely on third-party servers to store their video which are not necessarily as secure — or private — as Apple's own.
Apple will store up to ten days of recordings inside of iCloud for one camera if subscribed to the 200GB iCloud Storage Plan and will store up to ten days of recordings for five cameras if on the 2TB iCloud Storage Plan. HomeKit Secure Video recordings will not count against your storage capacity. The 2TB plan runs users $9.99 a month which is favorable compared to third-party storage plans and iCloud also has far more features to back it up outside of video storage.
Also announced at WWDC 2019 is support for HomeKit routers which will first be supported by Linksys and Eero.
16 Comments
Goodbye Nest Hello and your storage subscription. Getting this thing the day it's released.
Hope Netatmo actually moves on adding support this time. For basic HomeKit support it took them over a year to add support from when they first announced it.
This is an odd development because AppleInsider previously reported that wireless cameras were not supported by Apple HomeKit. So now they are?
Some people have very narrow spaces for doorbells. Any vendor which creates a slim design will win extra business.
The slide shown above says "10 day recordings" but when the person who was explaining the slide spoke he actually said "10 days of clips" which suggest to me that it's not really 10 days of continuous recordings but 10 days of motion detection recordings. I hope I'm wrong but he definitely said "clips". Another unknown is whether existing cameras will support this or whether a firmware upgrade will be needed or whether you have to buy a new camera. I put in a support ticket with Logitech three days ago and they told me "we contacted the developers because we want to know ourselves."