Paid Subscription For Cloud Storage

They wouldn’t be behaving in the way you are describing. They were working on that functionality but stopped when the partnership fell through. That would suggest they didn’t intend to offer NAS functionality without an additional hardware purchase. Otherwise they would have continued the project. So it seems they were planning to “charge” for the functionality anyway. Personally, I would find it distasteful to have to pay $75-100 for unneeded hardware just too get the functionality that I’d be willing to pay $5-10 for.

I’m not suggesting they do what Chamberlain is doing. They have a subscription. I’m talking about one and done. I’m talking about paying around 1/10 the price I might have needed to pay with their partnership.

Would you find it distasteful if they required an additional hardware purchase to get the software functionality?

Arguably that’s what any hardware product is, if a generic version exists. Plenty of generic cameras exist. I don’t find a closed ecosystem inherently distasteful, but it depends on the intent of the product. When a company that had previously had an open ecosystem, like Nest, actively decides to close it in an effort to screw over its competitors, I’m not a big fan of that, for example. I think it would be nice to open it up a bit, but if they’re trying to create a seamless user experience, that may require them to control the products to some extent. They may want to make the experience plug-and-play, for example, which would require them to build a piece of hardware for that experience

They provide RTSP beta firmware. They have demonstrated their willingness to allow the end user the ability to have more control than one would get with a simple plug and play setup.

If the goal is to give the user the best possible experience, they could easily continue their behavior by offering both a plug and play version and a user configurable option. If the goal, however, is to sell more hardware, then they are trying to create more profits and I’ll gladly pay a little more to use my hardware.

I agree. Anyway, I think they may still add it eventually. I don’t think they’re inherently opposed to allowing access, although they might be if they’re trying to control the user experience. I just don’t think they’d go the route of charging for that particular feature

There are some features I’d personally be happy to pay for, too, if I thought it would expedite the development process, but it doesn’t really work that way. (Especially a Virtual Switch functionality – Go vote for it!!! Haha.) Even though I personally want it enough I’d be willing to pay for it, their wishlist isn’t Kickstarter. If they decided to make every piece of functionality cost extra for arbitrary reasons, people would probably be annoyed and abandon the product.

Just for the sake of a bit of added context, part of the benefit of partnerships is the experience that the partner has that perhaps we don’t. We didn’t have all of the software solution ready to go when the partnership fell through so we unfortunately can’t just flip a switch and make NAS compatibility available for everyone. I can say that it’s still something being discussed in the office but it won’t be an immediate change if we find a solution. We would probably need to do a lot of rework at this point.

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That’s too bad. It seems to me Wyze has so much unrealized potential. I like Wyze and I’d like to have a reason to give you more money. But for me, there needs to be more work polishing the core components, the cameras, before I can see Wyze as more than a neat little toy. I know everyone is different. In my case, my smart stuff is built around SmartThings. So I have everything that talks to SmartThings and then I have Wyze.

And while the cameras can continuously record, saving the video comes across as an afterthought. I can pull the card out of the camera or I can save it on my phone and transfer it to a computer. Neither one of those are very convenient. I work in law enforcement so I’ve seen my share of surveillance systems and have had to pull video off of a number of systems. Wyze does not make a good surveillance camera. Until recently it only saved 12 second clips off the device itself. Even now, longer clips cannot be saved off camera if the internet is having issues or you don’t pay a subscription fee. So there’s real world practical reasons why I see NAS storage as a good idea and subscription storage as less than ideal.

Like I said, I realize everyone is different and they have different situations.

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Paid customer for Complete Motion Capture for a camera.

Camera is goes offline (e.g. unplugged). Click “View Playback”, receive “Camera is not connected”.

This renders this service mute should someone break in and steal my camera.

Note: Camera does have SD card installed and Bridge.

@zariok, CMC videos are available in the Events tab like the 12 second videos are. You should be able to view your cloud stored videos there. If you have any trouble, please let me know! :slight_smile:

@ThomasP, sorry for my delay! I appreciate your feedback and will share it with the team.

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@UserCustomerGwen Ok, perhaps I was confused about the functionality included with the subscription. I made an assumption there was a 14-day running playback available (like other competitive services).

CMC only saves video where motion was detected. If you have 14 days of continuous motion, you would have those videos in 5 minute sections. But the time without motion will not be stored.

“View Playback” is specifically from the SD card, which won’t be available if the camera is offline. It would probably be clearer as “View SD Card Playback” or something. CMC recordings would just show up under the Events tab.

I know that this form says launched but really it is not. I think what a lot of users want is a option to get more days of cloud recording. CMC does not do this. As far as I’m aware it only gives you 14 days. CMC only makes the camera record the whole event. Wyze please make a service for more days of Cloud Storage

Thank you for your feedback! Here is the copy from the first post:

“This feature is under consideration but is definitely not something that we’d rush into. Currently, our cloud storage includes 12 second alert videos with a 5 minute cooldown period (using a microSD card for local storage bypasses these recording limitations). We can’t just adjust how long videos are stored to add length to stored videos because the pricing structure isn’t linear. Some people have requested that we add an optional subscription service that WOULD NOT remove the current functionality but would allow people to use more storage space (adding to video lengths and/or removing or reducing the cooldown period).”

This topic is about clip length and the cooldown. Both of these limitation are removed with CMC. You may want to vote for a topic involving longer clip storage in the cloud instead so we can track that interest. :slight_smile:

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I believe you may be confusing this topic with the Wishlist request you created in November '19. :slight_smile:

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Oops I’m sorry

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If you would like to vote for the option to have more days of cloud storage you can do that here.

More days of cloud storage

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Hi WyzeGwendolyn

This service only seems to be available to American & Canadian residents ??? when will the rest of the World be included ?

Looking forward to your reply

Mike - United Kingdom Resident

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About International Sales

@michaelmoore

An answer to your question can be found in the following post from one of our forum moderators.

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We’re sorry, we don’t know when people outside of North America will be able to purchase this service. But I’ll share your interest with the team! :slight_smile:

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I have been paying for person detection for a while and had high hopes for it actually working.

Today, I am sick and tired of the missed detections due to the inherent limitations on the cameras.

The idea that a security device would pause its ability to capture or ever toy with the idea of waiting for a period of time after detection has inserted a huge lack of trust in the Wyze Cam devices.

This sucks sssssooooo bad because it’s simply a flawed decision on the heads of decision-makers at the company (and I love the story of growth, even during a pandemic and creating jobs), but the decisions surrounding this product are just too silly to pay for any longer.

With the amount of money I can save from canceling my beta trial special grandfathered pricing - I can buy other cameras which promise person detection without cloud fees. I knew it was all programming stored on the device itself - but for some reason$$$ Wyze decided to lock that feature behind a paywall…along with pausing the security of the device for 5 minutes between usefulness. This idea fully cancels my desire to continue my support any longer. I have four CamV2s and 1 square block for sell. Good luck everyone!

BTW - I also paid for Cam Plus, which sucks even more, because the subscription is a PITA to use. Not seeing any usefullness from the way I have to scroll through pages of crap on my phone to find if the camera detected anything or not. Out of every case, where I knew it should have recorded an Event - it missed it (AND was looking directly at the area!) What a joke. Totally worthless and waste of $.
Besides all this - to be truely secure, we (the customer) should be able to store the footage from our cameras on our own strorage spaces…dropbox, one drive, AWSS3 buckets, our own servers and never place our recordings in the hands and eyes of who knows?

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