But I guess the ones who need this the most (parents) also lack the time to do anything about it.
Can you be certain that at 3:46 in the morning that you'll be able to pull this up on your phone from bed and it will just work? What about if you are out and left the kid with a babysitter - can you reliably access from outside?
I went through quite a few Amazon cheapo RRSP cameras and they would invariably just stop working randomly in the most scary way for a baby monitor: they'd freeze frame and there is no way to know if the baby is just still or if the feed has hung. I thought about perhaps rigging up some infrared flashing LED or something but this was all a lot of effort and time and energy that as a new parent I just didn't have.
In the end I got some Nest cameras and have had zero downtime and they just work at home and when out and about. Say what you want about Google but I probably trust them more than most places to not let the cameras get hacked trivially.
It needs to work and reliability matters, but isn’t mission critical, life or death.
It is possible to raise a child without a baby monitor.
If not... I'm walking to the kids room to check. Which is not such an uncommon task that a slight risk of additional instances is a big deal.
> What about if you are out and left the kid with a babysitter - can you reliably access from outside.
If I left the kid with a babysitter it is because I uave sufficient level of trust in thr babysitter, and a baby monitor accessible from outside is a risk, not a benefit.
> Say what you want about Google but I probably trust them more than most places to not let the cameras get hacked trivially.
I trust a baby monitor that isn't exposed on a network more than one managed by Google.
This is one category of problem that should be solved through legislation, but I doubt that should such laws be passed, that they would be actually enforced against bad actors.
Like most regulations, it'll be just another weapon to entrench existing players, and keep new entrants out of the market.
The way things should work: right-to-repair means not only schematics, BOMs, and source code; it also means documentation on network protocols, and the ability for the end-user to repoint any sort of cloud/smartphone connected device to another endpoint.
IANAL, but I would think this would be covered by existing false advertising laws, and maybe breach of contract. They advertised a product as coming with features x, y, and z; people paid for those features; and then the company unilaterally disabled those features. So now features x, y, and z no longer work on the product as advertised. I'd be surprised if we don't see class action lawsuits for this.
Luckily this granddad does. I also get deployed by daughter in law to deal with any safety critical stuff in their house eg stair gates and mounting TVs on the wall that will survive an acrobat practising a new routine. Ironically enough, her other half is a railway safety engineer.
Technology isn't the be all and end all. Whilst I can and have rigged up a baby monitor from a spare Riolink, a spare PoE switch, a VPN back to my home Zoneminder etc, it isn't actually required. Yes I do have a lot of spare stuff and grandad's cloud is acceptable.
[1] - https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List#IP_C...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us20t1gQPOE
[3] - https://tailscale.com/
I think I'd stick with old gen RF monitors if I was concerned about the baby's health, lest you mistakenly end up with a good night's sleep.
"OK, here's a half-assed SaaS that will do most of what I want for $10/month, or I can cobble together my own half-assed solution that will do everything I want for 'free' (~$1000's worth of my own time more than a few years of the SaaS) ... which to choose..."
I don't really trust external businesses to get streaming video of the inside of my house, and I don't trust them to monitor my kid. But am I going to do a better job in a weekend? Hmm...