Good news for HomeKit and Netatmo surveillance camera users. These will soon be compatible with HomeKit Secure Video. This is already the case for Intelligent Indoor Cameras with and without siren (derived from the Welcome) thanks to an update deployed in February, and the manufacturer indicates that its Intelligent Outdoor Cameras with and without siren (derived from Presence) will receive one in turn “in the following days”. Users will thus have an additional storage option for their recordings, which it was previously possible to store on Dropbox, an FTP server or, for models with a microSD slot, on a memory card.
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More than a storage solution
Apple’s solution obviously relies on iCloud and promises to guarantee perfect confidentiality thanks to an encryption carried out before the videos are sent to the Apple brand servers. The recordings are kept for 10 days and visible in the in-house application, which also offers many configuration options, for alerts first of all with the recognition of people, animals or vehicles. Note that, as with encryption, image analysis is done locally.
It is also possible to include HomeKit Secure Video compatible cameras in the scenes and automations of the home application, in particular to use them as presence detectors for automatic lighting of lamps. It is therefore much more than a simple storage medium that Netatmo cameras gain with the Apple solution, and the manufacturer has indicated that it is preparing a similar update for its Smart Video Doorbell. Note, however, that HomeKit Secure Video requires an iCloud plan of at least 200 GB for a camera, and that it is not possible to use more than 5 cameras with the 2 TB plan.
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