Mea culpa: I used the term &quot;image recognition&quot; very haphazardly. What I meant to say was &quot;the service provides a lot of features that are only possible through heavy analysis of the video.&quot;<p>Have you considered the engineering effort that&#x27;d go in providing two different behaviors for the camera?<p>Let&#x27;s say we decide to support the simplest case: FTP to your local NAS. How do you format the video for it to be consumable by a normal user? Filling your hard drive with thousands of small video files is not a great experience, so that&#x27;s a problem. We could buffer as much as we can in-camera and then FTP a biggish (200mb) video file. Now that introduces a delay, because you can&#x27;t really watch the video until you are done buffering, so no real-timish stream. So you have to come up with a third alternative that provides every other feature the online camera has, because users <i>will</i> complain if their offline experience is different.<p>Then again, your local NAS might be stolen by the same burglars that broke into your house, and the whole exercise was a waste of everyone&#x27;s time.<p>Multiply that for each other possible combination (&quot;I want Dropbox support!&quot;, &quot;I want my files to be in an AVI container instead of MP4!&quot;, &quot;I want the camera to have a SIM slot so it can send me SMS messages when there&#x27;s a notification!&quot;) and you have a recipe for disaster. You get featuritis, lots of technical effort, and no actual financial incentive to do any of this work. Unless we sell a $700 camera, and nobody wants that.<p>As a small company, Dropcam had to draw the line somewhere. We didn&#x27;t want to be the product that provided a solution for every requirement that came our way (and believe me, we&#x27;ve seen all of these before), but rather a good product for people that were happy with:<p>1) a product that worked as advertised (one day, a group of us were trying to setup a competitor&#x27;s product: it took 4 engineers over half an hour before we gave up. This was supposed to be a &quot;5 minute setup&quot;)<p>2) a product that evolved over time: running features in the cloud allows you to give new value to device owners without requiring a new device<p>3) trusting the company to have strict internal processes to avoid unintentional or malicious access to anyone&#x27;s video (this was not treated lightly: a single case of anyone snooping on someone&#x27;s stream could completely ruin the trust the users put on us.)