These Smart Doorbells and Cameras Are About to Start Recording 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week
As video doorbells and smart cameras have proliferated in the consumer market over the past 15 years, most have reported the activity they capture through motion detection through clips—short video recordings ranging from fifteen seconds to a minute in length. You get a notification on your phone, tap it and get a short clip to watch.
While this process can cause some problems (sometimes the action can occur outside of the time limit for clips), it mostly works by balancing what consumers want to see without draining the camera’s battery too quickly. However, last month, a number of security system manufacturers announced what they call “continuous recording,” or the ability of these devices to record 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Here’s what it might look like.
Continuous monitoring is new to the consumer market, but not to business
Reolink first announced that their Altas PT Ultra will offer continuous monitoring back in September 2024. Later on October 2, Ring announced that their various devices would also begin offering the same. Continuous monitoring is nothing new and has previously been offered in many devices, including the eufyCam E330 24/7 security camera and the Arlo Pro 4 , as with all Unifi cameras. But most of these cameras are intended for “professional use”, that is, for business. The introduction of this feature for Ring and Reolink in consumer-specific models shows a shift in what people are looking for from their security monitoring devices.
I asked Ring if this change was driven by customers. Eric Kuhn, general manager of subscriptions and services for Ring, confirmed, “This is one of our most requested features and provides customers with added peace of mind,” adding, “24/7 Recording can help eliminate notification fatigue: When you turn on 24/7 Recording, 7, you can reduce the sensitivity of motion detection while ensuring you never miss a moment.”
As a Ring user and someone who’s tested a ton of security cameras, this rings true: I find myself slowly recharging my doorbell batteries sometimes, and I’m glad I got a break from having so many notifications to look through.
How notifications will work with constant monitoring
With Ring, you won’t lose notifications at all: you’ll still get video preview alerts so you can see what triggered the camera detection. After this you will receive a short clip. The difference is that now you can see what happened before and after that clip to give you more context. These features also fall under the new subscriptions: Ring Protect is now called “Ring Home” with three levels of service, but prices remain unchanged: Home Basic ($4.99 per month), Home Standard ($9.99 per month), and Home Premium. ($19.99/month).
To make it easier to find events across your vast new video library, Ring is introducing AI-powered Smart Video Search , available starting November 11, 2024. This will allow customers to search using text strings such as “blue ball”, rather than simply being able to view clips of events. The search recognizes many parameters such as animals, places, packages, people, time, vehicles and weather.
Wi-Fi and electricity demands will be higher
It seems clear that 24/7 monitoring will eventually become the standard for consumer cameras and doorbells, which raises some new questions. One aspect not mentioned in any press release promoting continuous surveillance cameras is how the shift will affect Wi-Fi or battery usage. In professional settings, cameras are almost always installed with constant power, either directly or via PoE (Power over Ethernet), while many consumers rely on battery power.
Ring’s press release states that continuous monitoring will only be available on “qualified wired cameras,” indicating that if you want to take advantage of this, you’ll likely have to do a little more upfront installation work. Unfortunately, my own Ring cameras are not PoE connected, so I’m likely out of luck.