Would you pay for RTSP?

We see the requests for RTSP and we want to build it. The problem is based on our market research the vast majority of our users have no idea what it is and wouldn’t use it, making it hard to allocate the large resources needed to build it. We know it’s very popular here. If we build it into a service plan, how many added subscription dollars would you be willing to pay for it each month?

Would you only be happy about having this feature if it were free?

We really want to make this happen this year. Just trying to build a business case if we can, but might do it even if there is no business case for it.

  • $0
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  • $2
  • $3
  • $4
  • $5+
0 voters
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This is probably one of the most exciting things I have seen from Wyze (personally) in a while! RTSP is a massive feature that many other competitors have. I am a huge Home Assistant user, which is where RTSP would come in really handy. I am not entirely sure about the behind the scenes stuff, but would Wyze be willing/interested in working with Home Assistant on a native integration that would bring in the camera feeds and AI detections and device settings/controls? I don’t wanna get too out of scope on what you’re asking us here but that alone would be something I would be willing to pay for whether it is a higher priced subscription or something that is sold as an add-on? I understand the push for subscription based revenue and the need for it. I want Wyze to be around, however I do believe there is money to be made in the hardware space. For example, I would LOVE to buy a bunch of climate/water/vibration/etc sensors that are Wyze branded but it is something that would need to integrate with Home Assistant otherwise I can’t integrate them with my smart home/farm.

4 Likes

If one of the reasons for so many of the RTSP requests (at least as I understand them) is for users to be able to consume Wyze Cam streams locally (i.e., on a user’s LAN) outside of the Wyze app, then I don’t understand this question:

Why would a feature built into the camera require a recurring monthly fee to use? (I guess I could ask the same thing about Edge AI and “free” Person Detection on Cam v4.[1])

Again (like I said in the topic with the poll about advertisements within the Wyze app), I don’t fault Wyze at all for exploring ways to increase revenue, especially if it means that more resources could be made available to address longstanding problems. I’m just trying to understand why a user would choose to pay a recurring fee for a local feature that’s included out-of-the-box in a competitor’s products with no need for a subscription.

What am I missing here? :confused:


  1. Oh, yeah. I have! :roll_eyes: ↩︎

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I hear this is popular, but I do not need it. Thanks.

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You are already using open source software and have a page some where acknowledging it, as required. Isn’t there some open source RTSP code floating around that you can use?

That’s doesn’t take too much effort, does it? Why the need to pay a recurring fee for something just done once?

6 Likes

Instead of this question:

Maybe this would be a better question:

How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for a Wyze Cam model with RTSP built-in and available at the time of purchase?

This makes me wonder if the RTSP could be a standard feature on “Pro” model cameras (at a premium price) or maybe a “Wyze R-series” line of Cams.

With a standard camera, you can be Wyze.
With a premium camera, you can be even WyzeR! :wink:
(I’m not sure what the WyzeST tier of cameras would be. ST series for SuperTelligence? The next level of AI?)

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Thank you for at least looking into it, WyzeDave. I have a few things to add for your consideration:

There will definitely be a strong voice of people who will never agree to pay a subscription for RTSP since their feelings are that the entire point of RTSP is to avoid subscriptions. I acknowledge that this puts you in a tough situation where you can’t reasonably afford to pay someone to build and maintain it if it is ONLY a drain on your income and doesn’t have a direct relationship to demonstrate that it pays for itself. thus we get stuck in a cycle of it never getting done.

I’m sure you’ve considered that a lot of the above people may not be a direct source of income, but they are a secondary source in a way. They are often excited to show people what they do with their smart home, and give recommendations, etc and then a percentage of those people will buy your products and some will end up subscribing. In the long run you will end up getting more subscriptions because they end up being free marketing for you. There are a lot of people who leave Wyze and suggest other companies just because you don’t offer RTSP or Home Assistant or HomeKit. So when people ask them for suggestions (Friends, family, forums, home assistant, even other tech sites, etc) they say some other company is the best, and those people trust them even though the new people may not care about RTSP or advanced options they use and RTSP is all that was important to the hobbiest who is giving recommendations. This indirect loss is still a lot of potential lost conversions and possible lost free marketing, especially for a company who primarily relies on “Word of Mouth” for most of their marketing. That being the case, providing RTSP simply fills in that huge gap you have. So I hope you take this into account with your cost analysis, because NOT doing it has also been costing a lot of lost revenue too, and not just in hardware sales, but word of mouth recommendations wherein a percentage of those turn into subscription conversions, even sometimes when they didn’t originally intend to pay a subscription. My parents bought a Wyze cam with no intention of paying a subscription, but they ended up doing it anyway against their initial intentions. How much are those losses costing and could those extra sales compensate for the resource development cost anyway?

I wonder if a third option could be a compromise with something along the lines of using Cam Plus and Cam Plus Pro subscription surplus/profit (even though I know your profit margins are low and reasonable) to INITIALLY fund the resources needed to build it and let people know that RTSP will initially only be allowed to Cam Plus subscribers for a certain period of time for this reason (that they are the only reason it’s possible for you to fund development of it) and that you plan to eventually open it up to everyone else as well when the cost recoupment is reasonable. Early access to features is usually a reasonable and common thing offered to subscribers (albeit rarely for something like RTSP which is nearly always seen as a universal free thing).

Another alternative could be to allow users to pay a one time fee to “unlock” access to it. The argument being that providing RTSP and ongoing firmware updates and bug and security testing, etc does cost money. This may satisfy the anti-subscription crowd that there isn’t a subscription, while covering the costs for development and projected ongoing maintenance that may not have been included or factored into the profit margins/costs of their initial hardware purchase. I would find this reasonable. Maybe a mix of allowing people to choose this option or including it with the subscriptions. Then at some point after you have it mostly developed, you can just include it in the cost of the hardware from the start, even if it’s only in the “Pro” models. You could even allow the option of a one-time lump sum vs the option to breakup that same amount into monthly payments for X amount of months. OR include it to all subscribers.

I will say that I would be willing to pay to have native RTSP that I could run directly to my Home Assistant Instance. Currently I use Docker Wyze Bridge instead, and it’s functional, but not quite as good as an official RTSP implementation, and I’d be willing to pay a reasonable amount to get direct RTSP access without a 3rd party converter. How much is hard to say. :thinking:

While all of the above are acceptable to me and I would use them and be very happy and tell tons of people, I will tell you what would make me drop dead EXCITED:

PERSONALLY, if you would go a step further and ALSO include full camera integration into home assistant, including integrating the notifications (how amazing would it be if you allowed descriptive notifications and regular AI detections to be parsed by home assistant and allow us to set our own custom triggers, etc based on all those things? People would be way more likely to pay your subscriptions if all your AI detections and notification text came into Home Assistant too). Also, ingrate all the settings options like camera on/off, floodlight on/off, siren on/off, motion on/off, and many others…several of which are already available for you to copy and paste from the open source 3rd party Wyze API in the Home Assistant Community Store. If you basically integrated the cameras with a direct Home Assistant integration, I would be super excited. Sure some people would use it for free, but if you integrated your AI detectsion to be used as triggers or your descriptive notifications to be parsed, I would totally upgrade to Cam Unlimited Pro to get all those extra benefits and have no regrets and everyone wins since it’s an integration like Google/Alexa where your server isn’t being “polled” like is necessary when you only allow 3rd parties to hack together a workaround (hence why you had to ban motion detection and sensors from the 3rd party solution because it was a polling workaround instead of an official integration like your Google/Alexa partnerships).

Another question I have for you, is what happens if you start developing RTSP and the CSA FINALLY gets around to releasing the Matter Camera libraries and you want to do that and maybe do that instead of RTSP? If you had people PAY to develop RTSP and then you drop it to switch to Matter, you may get some extremely upset people. If you have people pay specifically just for RTSP, you take the risk of what happens in the future when or if you change your mind or can’t keep maintaining it or whatever like happened in the past when you stopped supporting RTSP, only in the past it was free and now you will have had people who PAID for it. That is a fairly high risk, at least socially if not in other ways. For that reason, it would be safer to nest it under something like being funded through Cam Unlimited, etc. Then if you ever drop it or switch, there is less fall-out. An RTSP specific subscription would either need to be a limited time, one time payment or very, very low long-term price that pretty much just covers overall costs plus avg R&D cost over the life cycle.

Overall, I personally lean toward including it in a subscription as early access to reward subscribers to start with until you recoup costs. Make sure to tell anti-subscribers that you promise to live up to your value to “make great tech affordable to all” and will eventually release it to everyone else as well when you feel you have stabilized the costs it took to develop it, and you aren’t permanently paywalling it. Then consider doing the same thing by integrating Home Assistant with a free option (maybe just getting camera streams and a few settings that don’t cost anything) as well as extra subscriber entities that make it worth it to have the subscription like AI detection triggers, notification parsing, and more. Then you’ll get more people to love the bonuses from subscriptions and keep paying them too. I would.

Those are my initial thoughts. I may have more later.

For sure!

@cyberdog_17 beat me to half the stuff I was in the middle of writing because I talk too much, but I obviously support basically everything he said.

Yes, this is the main struggle. This is why I suggest doing a compromise with either “Early Access” for subscribers or a one-time/limited payment that covers the cost that wasn’t initially priced into the hardware, and then you can “Price it in” to future sales/models. People would still be upset about that, but it does address a fair rationale why. I think the amount has to be a really low amount though.

This is what I would lean toward to start with. Entry level cameras should probably be kept as affordable as possible. However, maybe once it’s built for one model securely and stability, it’s easy to port to the rest like a copy and paste, so if it’s not much effort, why not include it on almost all of them? Maybe that’s not the case, just considering reasons it might be better for all instead of just Pro.

This might be the way to go…just do it for new Pro models like you were saying and price it in from now on.

7 Likes

The majority of the user base don’t know nor want to tinker with rtsp. The ones who do are already using 3rd party software to do it now. I do. You can’t extract more subscription dollars from that group. And I have Cam Unlimited already.

1 Like

Amen to that!

4 Likes

I wanted to add my 2 bits here in the forum. I originally saw this on Reddit. RTSP is something that I have wanted for my cams for a long time. I would love to have a running archive of video footage on my local network instead of microSD cards as it currently sits. That being said, I do not agree with the idea that this should be a subscription-based feature. I do not subscribe to the Cam Plus plans as they do not offer 24/7 recording, which would be the only reason I would. So, having to pay every month for a feature that lots of other cameras have built-in.

That being said, I am all for pitching in to help pay for the R&D, though I can’t imagine there is much needed since older images used to have this ability and whatnot. This leads me to my votes, I chose $0 and $5+. I would not be willing to pay a monthly fee ($0), but as @carverofchoice said, I would not mind paying a one-time fee, be that per camera or account-wide (Think Cam Plus/Unlimited). This is a common form of allowing for extra features, especially in the A/V world. I would be willing to throw in an extra $5 or so per cam to have RTSP enabled on it permanently. I currently have 12 cams running on my account with more that I have yet to mount and hookup. All-in-all I have about 18 cams. That would bring in a one-time payment of $90. Perhaps even offer an all-access RTSP option for say $150 to unlock it on all cams attached to your account.

Again, just wanted to give my opinion and what I would be willing to do.

7 Likes

I’ve been thinking on this the last day or so, and the main thing I don’t like about the idea of a fee to get access (whether that be a subscription or one time payment, etc) is that it implies the need for cloud dependency to authorize/authenticate the camera to have permission to use RTSP and half the point of RTSP is that it shouldn’t be cloud dependent. If it’s not cloud-dependent, then why couldn’t someone just share the new firmware with others, etc. In order for a paid authorization for RTSP to work, it requires cloud dependency and most people who want RTSP want reassurance that it will continue to work even if there is no internet access.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there are these main options for it to be a success:

  1. Promise everyone will eventually get it included without additional costs, but existing Cam Plus subscribers and one-time payment users can unlock RTSP EARLY ACCESS or being the main reason they were able to afford and fund the R&D losses they sustained by taking resources off other projects to devote to this instead for a while. I personally think this is a reasonable compromise as long as they really do switch to giving it to everyone [for free] after a reasonable period of time. During this Early Access, it would have to be authenticated through the server/cloud to ensure only approved accounts can use it, but later it would have to be transitioned to be able to work 100% locally with cloud authentication not being required, not even when it reboots and has no internet. RTSP should work even without Wyze server authentication, but all the extra Wyze cloud stuff can be limited without internet.
  2. Only do it for new camera models and build the cost into the sale of the new camera like everyone else does.
  3. Just bite the bullet and implement it for everyone right away. You’ll get a lot of positive press, and a lot of secondary rewards that will likely make up for the cost in the long run. People who started with Wyze for their entrance into Cameras and didn’t know about RTSP when they started will be less likely to ditch Wyze when they learn how important it is and decide they really want it now. Hobbiests who do cool things with your cameras will post cool videos online about the neat automations they did that went viral and they will tell people they did it with Wyze cams. When their friends ask about cams, they’ll say they use Wyze cams. All these secondary benefits will bring new people into your funnel and some of them will get your subscriptions because they don’t care about RTSP. I don’t think adding RTSP will make a huge negative impact to your subscription model, because the people who want RTSP will still get it a different way, but then you lose a lot of secondary benefits of them keeping you as a company.

I think the overall reaction to this third option will have the greatest overall positive longterm results and is probably worth the investment…but I think option 1 and 2 are fairly acceptable options too. I would highly support ANY of the above options, but I would be most excited about option 3 and you would have a lot of people really happy about it. I really think it would pay for itself, but it’s hard to measure a lot of those secondary benefits. :frowning: That’s what’s been holding back others from approving this long ago. The RTSP crowd is a minority of enthusiasts/hobbiests, but it is also a VERY IMPORTANT core crowd of people who hold strong influence with so many other people. They are often the ones people come to for advice, recommendations, etc…and if they are driven away from your products, their recommendations and influence goes to someone else and competitors are capitalizing on that even though few of their customers are using RTSP.

7 Likes

18 posts were split to a new topic: Lack of support for 3rd-party integrations

There are many RTSP apps out there some free

If Wyze creates their own, you take the thunder ( desire to use) the actual Wyze App. THen you become just another hardware maker/provider.

Careful what you wish for.

Being like everyone else, you end up becoming part of them

You’ll end up with Industry consolidation

Which I think is coming anyway

For me, RTSP no big deal

Most “users” just want security cameras etc
Plug em in an just work.

Overall you would be focusing on a small segment of “User Wants”

From a business perspective, it might not be the best thing to focus on.

3 Likes

I do see where you are coming from here. Perhaps it should be an account-wide thing, giving you firmware updates with RTSP built in for all your cameras. I could see picking and choosing cams being a bit of a hassle, especially if you have a user who accidentally picked the wrong cam and then want to transfer this license to another cam. This would allow minimum “authentication” to get the feature running and prevent it from interfering with offline operation.

1 Like

Well well well, @WyzeDave I was gonna write a small paragraph in here but as I read through every single thing I was going to write @carverofchoice put on point precisely yet again which is why yet again he is is an amazing ( if not the MOST DETAILED ) MAVEN

The one thing I think I would like to throw in here is that I think this would very do very very well as a community wide email to a survey as we have done many many times over the year regarding if people know what RTSP is and if they would utilize it, and more so if they would find it worthwhile to pay a small fee to keep it up to date and secure. I would argue the “nerdiest” In the most complementary way hang out on the forums and an email or Facebook post would go to the community at large which would give us a wider span as to who would truly utilize this or who understands what it is and how to use it. I do know of quite a few nerds sadly that do not use the forums despite my repeated attempts to get them here as they are ridiculously helpful in troubleshooting many many times.

6 Likes

There’s custom firmware that allows RTSP, so honestly, I wouldn’t think it’s hard to look at that and include it.

If this is about supporting it, a good first step would be to at least not block those community devs from implementing features that you don’t have the resources to support and just let the dev community handle that feature.

I’m already paying for the subscription to get package detection and I’d be willing to pay an extra dollar if that would mean support of RTSP firmware versions.

But I agree with the comments above that really, the point of RTSP is that it doesn’t need to connect to the cloud at all, so I’d rather pay a one-time fee to activate the feature than a monthly subscription.

Side note:
Also agree with the wishlist item to have tighter home assistant integration for AI events. Right now I let home assistant read my Wyze notifications to let me know when a package arrived and then send me the picture from an RTSP stream of one of my other cameras.

1 Like

PLEASE tell me how you did this @Moootz
I’ve been wanting to do this and didn’t realize it was already possible.

I already have The Joshua/Katie Mulliken 3rd party Wyze API from the the HACStore installed. Is it possible through that or how else are you able to get home assistant to read your Wyze notifications?

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I actually don’t use a Wyze integration and just use the standard Home Assistant app where you can expose Android phone notifications as a sensor.

On the Home Assistant App: Settings → Companion App → Manage Sensors → Last Notification → enable → allow list (add Wyze to it)

Then have an automation trigger at template by notification State. E.g.:
{{ ‘Package’ in states(‘sensor.moootz_phone_last_notification’) }}

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OMG I never even considered using that sensor even though I already had it enabled! That’s so awesome!!! I’m so excited! I appreciate you taking the time to respond on this. This opens up so many new possibilities! I can now turn every single kind of Wyze detection into a sensor for triggers and automations! This opens up so many possibilities. This is the coolest thing I’ve learned in months and it was right in front of my face this entire time. :man_facepalming:

Your comment made my day. My utmost thanks to you @Moootz !!!

7 Likes

I will add to those saying no to a subscription but yes I would pay a one time fee to activate on existing cameras or as a premium sku on new products going forward but would be disappoint if it was only on new products and not made available for already purchased cameras

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