Smart home technology brings convenience and new features to everything from light bulbs to complex automations. But it also often comes with a hidden, ongoing cost in the form of subscriptions. For someone who relies on smart home cameras as part of their security setup, those cloud video subscriptions can soon add up to some very real money. But that doesn’t mean that paying up is the only option.
While smart security camera makers often prefer to sell you a subscription, or hook into that of another platform, their products can usually work just fine without a recurring fee. You can ditch that video camera subscription, and you might even gain some functionality in the process.
Take control of your cameras
Reroute feeds away from the cloud
Buy a modern home security camera, and there’s every chance that it will be designed to send video streams to remote servers. Those servers could be responsible for things like object detection or other AI-powered features. But more often than not, they’re there to store video footage so that you can watch it back at a later date.
But while that might be the way most people use these cameras, there’s an alternative route. Real-Time Streaming Protocol, or RTSP, allows you to bypass those cloud servers and handle local streaming of video instead. And once you have control of the video itself, the world is your oyster.
Having your security cameras send their video streams to a device inside your network instead of one in an unknown data center opens the door to all kinds of options. Lightweight processing middleware, such as the popular Scrypted, can handle video transcoding and processing of streams using your own server. It can handle object and people detection, and it does it all without the lag that often comes with waiting for a video stream to reach a remote server only to be sent straight back to whence it came.
In-house features
Plus cross-platform portability
Security camera companies will often try to justify their monthly fees by placing features behind a paywall. Those features tend to use artificial intelligence to detect people, vehicles, pets, and even parcels. But they don’t have a monopoly on those features.
Scrypted, as mentioned, can handle many of the same features plus some new ones all while maintaining local control of your data. And by tying it into a smart home hub like Home Assistant, the world of automation opens up in ways that closed ecosystems can’t match.
Even better, Scrypted’s flexibility can be leveraged to bridge the gap between existing ecosystems, such as Apple’s HomeKit. I use Scrypted to ditch Ring’s monthly fees while also adding support for Apple HomeKit Secure Video — something Ring refuses to do by itself. It’s this kind of flexibility and interoperability that something like Scrypted offers. Importantly, it brings it to devices and accessories that would otherwise refuse to work together properly, if at all.
At times, it can feel like taking control of the technology in our own homes is a losing battle. But Scrypted takes that battle to the camera makers. And they don’t know what hit them.
Going beyond cameras
The Home Assistant bonus
Using Scrypted within a Home Assistant smart home setup can be extremely liberating. Not only does it give you back control of the footage your cameras capture, but it also offers up a raft of additional options and features. Home Assistant is full to the brim with customization options and support for every major smart home device and accessory that you’re likely to come across. And if it doesn’t support it yet, it’s usually only a matter of time before it does.
Interoperability shouldn’t be overlooked when discussing Home Assistant’s powers, but its customization options are also key to its popularity. Apple, Google, Amazon, and others all offer ways for you to interact with your smart home — assuming they support your chosen devices and accessories, of course. But you’ll be stuck with the interface that those companies chose, with buttons and toggles and overall frameworks that aren’t designed to work around you. Instead, you’re supposed to work around them.
Not so with Home Assistant. You can create different views with different aesthetics, all housing whatever devices or features you like. You can design a dashboard that is built with your kids in mind, stripping back the features they don’t need and putting the ones that they do front and center. But you can also make a dashboard that looks like something from Mission Control, complete with weather data, metrics related to your home media server, and so much more.
It’s impossible to really detail what Home Assistant can do for you because the possibilities are essentially endless. And, like Scrypted, it’s entirely free as well.
Roll your own camera features
All with zero subscription fees
Transitioning your smart home and its security cameras away from subscriptions and a reliance on external servers isn’t a two-minute job. It requires some planning and some know-how. But the money saved by ditching those subscriptions soon makes the initial setup effort worth it, and that’s before we consider the potential for improved performance and obvious privacy benefits.
Systems like Scrypted and Home Assistant prove that cloud services and subscription fees aren’t a necessity just to be told when someone leaves a delivery at your door. And they offer up so much more than that, too, including the knowledge that your cameras will still work when the internet is out — and that isn’t something that everyone can boast.