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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I’d be perfectly happy to buy tons of gadgetry like ring and nest products just so long as it doesn’t need some kind of cloud service, and it doesn’t need any kind of subscription.

The drone looks really well designed and practical (compared to buying dozens of separate cameras you can have just a couple, and a drone).

Yet most things that come to market are exactly this. Cloud services, subsctiptions and integration with these “smart speakers” (I’m not getting one of those either, so long as they are connected to whoever sold it rather than just to the weather web service).

I wish someone who didn’t have an interest in knowing everything about everyone but could actually make money from hardware would do this.

Is there really no market for that?

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Thats because the "real" product they are selling is the data collection. Also, subscription services are much more attractive to companies because its a guaranteed and predictable revenue stream.

Also, doing everything over the internet to centralized "cloud" servers is easier to develop for and manage, and its easier on the end user to set up, strengthening the product. Although I think this is more of a cherry on top of the big pile of data they're getting on you.

It also probably subsidizes the unit cost. Companies would much rather sell you a "cheaper" device with a subscription plan than a potentially more expensive device with one-time payment. Your average consumer will choose the device that is cheaper up-front for the same reasons.

The technical, privacy-focused crowd that tends to populate this forum is already being served by the type of cameras you can already buy on Monoprice, Newegg, or some other related store. Can you imagine a company like Amazon selling that kind of product? I sure can't.

With that said, if anyone would sell a privacy-focused device with all the same benefits as Ring, it would probably be Apple since privacy is part of their brand. I don't think the odds of that happening soon are high, but I could be wrong.

>Thats because the "real" product they are selling is the data collection. Also, subscription services are much more attractive to companies because its a guaranteed and predictable revenue stream

that's the money-shot line . you nailed it

I work for a residential IoT company.

The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely. Otherwise you're just talking something in the home (BLE, etc).

If you don't have some type of service the average consumer will not be able to use it, people aren't going to setup NAS devices, or other servers in their house to collect video data. Even a wireless DVR system can be a pain (another box, likely another TV to see it, etc).

I know that this community is more on the side of the skepticism of collecting data, but keep in mind the total addressable market is mostly people who don't want to deal with these problems.

Now if you're talking about "if the cloud service is down my device doesn't work" then I completely agree, these devices need to have enough local functionality to operate/buffer without their service working for extended periods of time, or being removed.

Ring already has a base station. Why doesn't that base station have a solid state drive to store all the video/images, and allow the user to view them on their smart phone by connecting to the base station through the wifi?

The argument "you need to upload all your data to our servers or you'll likely have to get another to TV to view it" is just beyond lame.

> Why doesn't that base station have a solid state drive to store all the video/images

Everything is cheaper per pound in a data center. And they can force updates if the client is dumber.

And the customers won't complain when the SSD eventually dies.

> and allow the user to view them on their smart phone by connecting to the base station through the wifi?

Because people will want to do it across WAN. LAN-only is one piece of code, WAN-only is another. Going up to WAN for everything is redundant but costs less dev time.

Yes, it's frustrating for us who care about privacy. The motive is never to build a good product that respects people and does what they want. The motive is always to make money. Every corner must be cut.

> Everything is cheaper per pound in a data center....Going up to WAN for everything is redundant but costs less dev time.

Yes, agreed. That's just a totally different argument than the one supergeek133 made, so my point stands.

Yes my argument was business and ease for the customer, not what this is.

I suspect the answer is not a technical one, but a business one. I'm guessing that adding local-only usage features just aren't profitable enough (not enough increase in market share by implementing them) for Ring to justify the effort.

Running a platform costs money, many IoT products turn cost negative quickly if you don't introduce some type of value added service/ongoing revenue.

That being said I've always been a huge proponent of allowing some type of local control. Think of people in the automation market (Control 4, CEDIA type stuff) where it would simply be faster.

Even Google/Amazon allow local lambda function type activities that would be much better experience if we allowed local control.

But that also changes your security landscape.

Everything else that the other people listed (cost model, pricing, etc.) PLUS, if it is a box, you can follow the cables or look where the TV/router is, find the box, take it with you, and the evidence is gone.

Like this, even if the perpetrator takes the camera/bell with him/her, the evidence stays on the cloud.

Also, for evidence to be admissible in a court of law, one has to prove the chain of custody. Something in your laptop is more prone to editing than a video sitting on a cloud where logs vouch for its integrity.

Edit: don't let me invoke the gods of security frameworks. My laptop at home is not ISO27001 compliant, has never been assessed for security etc. The infrastructure of Ring (I believe) is regularly assessed/audited.

My question was rhetorical. As I said elsewhere, I was criticizing supergeek133's particular justification, not actually looking for the real reason.

The ""you need to upload all your data to our servers or you'll likely have to get another to TV to view it"" argument was involving the typical 8-camera wired DVR systems you commonly see in restaurants and in some homes.

It needs to be connected to a TV to view the video locally, or you need to have some technical knowledge to setup RTSP on your LAN.

Again, total addressable market.

Ok, but then how is that relevant to the topic? Folks in this thread are complaining that Ring wants to gobble up all the user data for services that could be offered without a cloud connection (including remote video watching). The reasons, as far as I can tell, are that (1) it's a bit cheaper through the cloud because of economies of scale and (2) Ring makes money off the data. It is not because it unavoidably requires technical sophistication/effort by the user.

Do you disagree?

The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely. Otherwise you're just talking something in the home (BLE, etc).

Does Apple use iCloud for HomeKit, or is it all on the iPad/AppleTV that acts as the home hub?

I've had two HomeKit cameras at home for a while now. HomeKit cameras default to stream only (via the homebridge) while any of the people who have access to the camera are home. When everyone's out, it records/streams to iCloud, and this part is purportedly end to end encrypted, so that only devices of people who've been granted access to the camera(s) can watch it.

Homekit devices also require a mFI chip to participate in HomeKit (or develop software to connect to another device in the home with mFI chip).

> The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely.

This is a pain, but solvable by punching holes in all the NAT pair combinations. At a previous startup we all communication peer to peer (phones, custom home devices, laptops), no data traversed our servers ("the cloud"). It worked beautifully.

> keep in mind the total addressable market is mostly people who don't want to deal with these problems.

> This is a pain, but solvable by punching holes in all the NAT pair combinations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3RqDp7i308

I think I wasn't clear in the first post. The customer did not have to do anything (i.e. no need to configure any NAT passthroughs on their router etc), this was entirely transparent to the user.

I get that most people don't like to deal with that sort of set up. But we live in a world where the Raspberry Pi is extremely popular, yet also the most average consumer unfriendly computer in the entire world. Not everything needs to be a mass market product to be successful.

What's the sales of Raspberry Pi versus something like a connected camera (Nest cam, dropcam, etc).

"Popular" is relative.

Don't pretty much all drones need internet access in order to confirm it is not flying in a restricted area? Unless you baked in the maps beforehand, I suppose. My brother bought a drone to inspect my parents' roof for damage, but then he couldn't even fly it until it updated the maps and after that there was baked in DRM saying the current GPS coordinates were restricted (likely because of nearby military base) and the drone refused to take off.

Seems like the golden age of drones for hobbyist pilots was before all the regulation kicked in, but in this case perhaps Ring could get an exception to restricted areas since they are indoor drones.

> there was baked in DRM saying the current GPS coordinates were restricted

seems like you've answered your own question there

Well I suppose it's possible to have a drone that doesn't need internet access as long as all the maps are pre-loaded. But since new airports are built and restricted areas are updated, most drones require internet to update the maps.

There are plenty of toy drones with cameras and no location awareness. I’m pretty sure that functionality is not legally required, but is just enabled by drone manufacturers who don’t want their products causing trouble. And I believe anything under 8 ounces doesn’t even need to be registered with the FAA, and it’s likely that this little drone camera is under that.

> I’d be perfectly happy to buy tons of gadgetry like ring and nest products just so long as it doesn’t need some kind of cloud service, and it doesn’t need any kind of subscription.

Same here. Is there any company working on this product space?

It will never be created by a large corporation or VC-backed startup because those have a need to extract every penny of income from the product line which means there will be a subscription and there will be cloud data gathering which will be sold to advertisers.

But a small privately held company could sustainably target the niche of stand-alone home automation devices for the target audiences who care about privacy and/or prefer no recurring monthly fee.

(I worked on a startup addressing a small segment of this space but over time we (the initial engineering team) lost control to the investors and it morphed into a cloud-dependent service and then promptly died. Would love to work on that space again but without the investors to keep the focus sharp.)

For the most part people are not capable of having internet connected IoT devices that don’t go to third party servers. You really think it’s a good idea to open up ports to shitty Chinese cameras inside your house and let them run as servers on the naked internet? Cameras that connect to third party servers need subscriptions to pay for the resources they consume.

Cameras that don’t need to be accessed over the internet are not the same market as internet connected cameras. For a thousand bucks or so you can get a few decent cameras and an NVR and have all the local camera viewing and recording you want. But most people don’t really need that.

This is one of the problems that need solving. Perhaps I could buy a service from a third party that could relay or store traffic from things in my home, without me having to fear that it’s used for advertising?

I imagine there is 100% a good medium sized market for disconnect smart home technology but no one cares about medium markets anymore? The BIG players are in on this space and they know if they make a cheap and ubiquitous enough product the next treasure trove of data is theirs.

So, any company in that space is competing against FAANG which is pretty daunting...

Pine64 is making a privacy focused camera gadget, but it isn't out yet. Not sure what the story around the apps is going to be though.

https://www.pine64.org/cube/

I’m building a nationwide network that’s focused on privacy. Currently designed to find missing pets but other applications are planned as well.

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