Some of these thoughts are not very organized, but here is what comes to mind off the top of my head:
First, I will say that I am fairly satisfied with motion events only, though I do kind of wish I had more control over the sensitivity in certain use cases. There are times when things happen but they don’t meet the sensitivity threshold, and thus an event doesn’t occur.
I think 24/7 recording would be beneficial for Cam Protect in these instances because it would ensure the AI can always scan the image and nothing is ever missed. Though I acknowledge that detections still require a certain number of pixels to maintain a reasonable confidence interval level, and in theory, that number of pixels should always be sufficient to initiate an event, so maybe continuous upload doesn’t matter too much in such a case.
The main concern I would have is that LOTS of people in this country have really terrible upload bandwidth. Sometimes their cable provider will even tell them they have sufficient max upload in theory, but in practice it is horrendous. Even people with awesome internet like me, who have 1Gbps fiber up and down, imagine if all 40 of my cameras were constantly uploading 24/7 instead of only uploading events. That would probably still be pretty brutal on my router, modem, and bandwidth, but I see people in here who sometimes struggle with their router and internet being able to handle even just a couple of cameras on Cam Plus before they start blaming Wyze for the cloud events not working well.
Having said all of the above, if I did have this service, I would use it much more often than my SD card playback. I love that I can watch uploaded video in 4x speed, and uploaded video has audio synced correctly better than the SD card, so I prefer to save cloud videos.
Answer 2 :As for price, it’s hard to say, and I am not sure I am a good judge of that in this case because I have the technical ability to make my own DVR/NAS/Cloud storage, so my threshold would be lower since I could basically do it myself. BUT lots of people can’t/won’t and so this would be more targeting people unlikely to use NAS workarounds. There are some people who basically already have 24/7 recording. For example, I have a camera near my swimming pool and I am sure that it has pretty close to 24/7 recording because the water waves are nearly constantly moving and reflecting light and shadows day and night.
Features I’d like:
- I’d like to be able to better trim video downloads to specific times. Sometimes I just want a short recording. Maybe my toddler says something funny during dinner and I only need 5-10seconds of video. But currently I have to download the entire 5 minute video then find a video editor to trim it down to just the part I want. Or sometimes I want an event that happened, but half of it happened in the first 5 minute event clip and the ending happened in the first few seconds of the second 5 minute event clip, so now I have to download both and then trim them and then stitch them. Or I can just go record it from the SD card instead, but then sometimes the audio isn’t as good or the codec seems different for some video players. I would want to be able to tell a 24hr cloud event playback to record starting at this time and stop at this time…either like we can do on the SD card playback, or marking it on a timeline where we want it to start and stop and have your server trim it to those times and let us download it that way.
- If it is recording/uploading 24/7, does that mean the AI is checking EVERY FRAME now, or would the AI only be told to scan frames when there is “motion” (a difference between frames)?
- With 24/7 recording, the app events tab would need a complete overall to either have a timeline like the SD card playback, or at least give us better filtering options like the Web portal:
- Right now, the app is really difficult to find the events you want. It always starts you at latest available event. So if you look at a previous day, it starts you at at 11:59pm. So now if you want to look at something that happened yesterday at 7 am, you have to do the following: Scroll, pause for a few seconds while you wait for more events to load…scroll some more and then pause for several seconds and wait for more events to load again…repeat that a hundred times before you finally get 7am (if you’re still awake). It can be very difficult to get to morning events and that’s when it is only recording motion events. If it was recording 24/7 This would be very frustrating for people. You should definitely resolve this before you launch any 24/7 recording service.
- There should be consideration of some kind of recommendation or warning to people about limitations. For example, how many cameras should they have recording 24/7 for what upload bandwidth limits? How do you tell them to make sure they have a “good” router (and modem), instead of the junk that comes from their cable company? These things will be more important if people are doing 24/7 recording and doing it with multiple cameras. Even if the fault lies with their router and their bandwidth, they’re going to blame you and say “I know it’s Wyze because my ____ Device works fine” even though there are a million reasons to explain that experience…including the fact that TV’s can “buffer” but intermittent connectivity destroys liveview uploads.
Those were considerations off the top of my head. I have to run and do an errand really quick, so I’m cutting my thoughts off here and not reorganizing the above…but if I think up more considerations or features, I will add another comment.