Imagine this – you are moving into a new house and you want a little more security than usual and you spend around Rs 2000 for a CCTV camera and you think that’s that. That thought is what will catch you off-guard because the setup and installation cost is not the end of your expenditure. A budget smart camera is one of the easiest purchases you can make. You get a great spec sheet for the price of a nice dinner. 2K videos, night vision, two-way sound and an app to control everything with. Except it is mostly just going to be view only because the things you want like saved footage are locked behind a paywall that you may not have been aware of these hidden costs.
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Most cloud-first cameras offer a trial period for cloud storage which may run for a month or so. After that, your saved video clips will be a part of a monthly subscription plan. Let’s take a ₹2,000 camera that is associated with a subscription plan of ₹110 a month. Over the course of three years, you would pay ₹3,960. In addition to the cost of the hardware itself, your total bill amounts to ₹6,000 for a ₹2,000 camera. That’s three times what it costs, for something you’ve already purchased.
Hardware is never for free. It is thanks to the recurring revenue model that the companies are able to sell their cameras so cheaply, in the same way, the ink printer business model works. Sale days at the marketplaces make these cameras available for ₹1,500 while the subscription plan doesn’t even appear in the product page header.
Expanding upon that, people don’t install only one camera to protect their home. What they need is a camera outside of the door, one for the living room, one for the balcony and perhaps even another one for the child’s room. That increases the price by four to ₹24,000, the price of an excellent mid-range smartphone.
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The counterargument is that you do not own the camera itself, but that you own the contract for renting the camera, with the camera being an additional feature. This means that although the device can record videos, the important parts, including the video history, person recognition, and intelligent alerts, remain within the possession of the company in their cloud service. Once you stop making payments, videos will be deleted or certain features disabled. Some companies offer pay-for features post-release of their products.
128 GB high-endurance microSD cards cost a few hundred rupees and store videos ranging between days and weeks depending on the resolution. No monthly fee, and the footage remains on your own four walls. The reason is that every upload on the cloud is an upload of the recording of your life somewhere else.
The other thing about the Indian household is power cuts and unpredictable broadband internet connection. The cloud-based cameras will not record anything to the cloud in case there is no power on the router. The microSD card records as long as there is power on the camera.
There are some disadvantages of local storage that should be kept in mind. The burglar that steals the camera also steals the microSD card. The standard SD cards are not reliable with persistent writes, so the high endurance ones should be chosen. Downloading videos from somewhere else would take more time than opening a cloud application.
The proper course of action would be a hybrid solution. The microSD cards should be used in each camera for recording locally. Subscribe to the cloud service for only one or two cameras keeping an eye on the entrance points where off-site backup is relevant. More than four cameras would be best with a NVR system.
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