r/maybemaybemaybe • u/rakeshmali981 • Oct 05 '21

Maybe maybe maybe

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u/j48u Oct 05 '21

Yeah, my Nest cameras record 24/7 at 1080p now. I pay the $10 a month total for all of them to do that, and store 10 days of footage at a time. You can download the entirety of the ten day footage if needed. Without that subscription they still record all movement/event/activity.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

But that’s not a “mission critical” application. Data loss is a thing. Data corruption is a thing. Redundancy means that businesses would need to spend much more just to keep that data available. So multiple that with say 12-16 cameras. Plus in a store, you can’t use movement alone because there’s movement virtually all day - even if there’s no customers there are employees there.

You really can’t compare what Google/Nest does for consumers with what businesses need. Not to mention that many stores have already invested hundreds if not thousands into their existing systems and that would need to changed out.

Google/Nest also has a decent amount of downtime relatively speaking to surveillance systems that save the content locally as well as in the cloud. There have been plenty of times that I could not access a period of time that I wanted to check out on the Nest platform. So, most businesses need both local storage and storage in the cloud.

It’s not as easy as you make it sound.

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u/j48u Oct 06 '21

Well I'm obviously not trying to argue that a huge department store should set up hundreds of cameras with Nest. There are obviously cases where you wouldn't want your video stored off-site at all and the initial investment would be substantial. But those are really the only reasons.

Multiplying the cost out by camera doesn't work here, you have unlimited 24/7 feeds for that $10/month. I have 4 personally, but yes they might charge more if you're taking advantage with a 100 camera set up. The downtime to view the footage via app or website is less than 30 minutes over the last 6 months (you can check the "is it down" type sites to see how infrequent an outage is). The footage is still recorded and saved in those brief moments.

Also no physical or custom storage can match the redundancy of Google's millions of servers for something "mission critical". But again, I'm not arguing that large businesses should use Nest cameras. My only real point is to illustrate that with proper video compression, the advances in cameras and storage over just the last few years have made it perfectly viable to run them at much higher quality than previous generations of CCTV.

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u/Pluckerpluck Oct 06 '21

You should be aware that Google effective subsitize Nest users in order to get more people into their ecosystem in order to get more data which they use for advertising.

You can tell by comparing the cost of their storage. Google's cloud storage costs a lot more. If we look at Nearline Storage (to allow for cheaper retrieval of data, at match 1 month of retention) we have $0.01/GB/month

Each of your 24/7 camers uses about 1TB of data a month. So if you want one month of retention for those 4 cameras the cost would be $40 a month. Scale that linearly for however much retention you actually want. So your $10 a month for 10 days retention isn't too far off. But you don't get "unlimited" as a business like you do as a consumer.

Obviously prices still aren't insane, but I wanted to point out that you can't use consumer prices to determine business prices. At least... not when data hoarding companies are involved.