Who’s Watching Your Porch?
I run video surveillance at my home out of some combination of paranoia and curiosity. But I run everything myself - cameras are recorded by an in-house NVR, which is an inexpensive single-board computer with a 1TB hard disk, and &#x27;alert&#x27; clips are uploaded to a VPS on the off chance of someone breaking in and stealing the NVR.<p>Although open source NVR packages are, in my experience, a massive disaster (either extremely outdated and frustrating to set up and use in the case of ZoneMinder, or extremely feature limited as in the case of the fifty Raspberry Pi-based solutions), commercial software packages like Blue Iris and Xeoma (which is even cross-platform) are inexpensive and have expansive feature sets. I use Blue Iris, which has the downside of requiring Windows, but the upside of generating MQTT messages or HTTP requests on alerts which makes for a lot of easy integration. Xeoma is cross-platform but relatively immature (although I&#x27;ve found the vendor to be extremely responsive to emails) and has a bizarro-land UI that&#x27;s very tricky to learn to use.<p>On the other hand, consumers don&#x27;t necessarily need to deal with any of this, because lots of vendors sell NVR appliances that are hardware and software in one product, and they&#x27;re pretty cheap. Costco even regularly carries them from a couple of major manufacturers. I prefer to do things myself, but I&#x27;ve used appliance NVRs from Swann in a couple of cases and they work fine with extremely easy setup. More recently Ubiquiti has gotten into this space, and I haven&#x27;t had the opportunity to try their system yet but their products tend to be pretty good quality and ease of use for the rock-bottom prices - and as I understand it their premises-based NVR also runs the UniFi manager, so it makes it really easy to build out a large-campus WiFi-based solution but might also be a neat trick for home use if you want to use the great-for-the-price Ubiquiti APs and&#x2F;or USG.<p>At the end of the day, I&#x27;m not convinced that cloud-based surveillance solutions really offer much to consumers beyond being backed by vendors with very aggressive marketing. Most people know about Ring cameras but don&#x27;t know that they can buy a completely non-cloud, on-prem solution-in-a-box at the big box store or even, well, from Amazon. And at the end of the day, the manufacturers of these on-premises systems don&#x27;t get to loop you into a &quot;social network of fear&quot; and analyze your video, so their opportunities to monetize are a lot more limited, and so they charge higher up-front prices.<p>I think a lot of it is just awareness though - Amazon and their competition are pushing their cloud-based solutions very hard, while the on-prem surveillance vendors that have for the most part been around much longer just don&#x27;t really advertise to the consumer market.