This is a very broad suggestion to Ring for a new product line. I understand the entire point of Ring is it is cloud connected, and this in no-way eliminates that (in fact it would improve the cloud functionality even more).
The product I am suggesting is “ring record”, a device to sit on the same LAN/WLAN as the cameras/doorbells and become the target of those cameras recording uploads (and potentially the streaming source for any app-users on the same network too). By default ring record would simply receive and immediately forward the recording to the Ring cloud anyway. That would never change, what would change would be the additional options to:
- also save the recording to an attached HDD (make it an array even?)
- using the stored data and fall back to buffering this data to Ring at a later time if immediate streaming to cloud wasn’t possible (i.e maybe the immediate stream could be low quality and the later stored data could be used to ‘touch up’ the recording quality if an upgradable/improvable codec is used)
- have some advanced routing options that would allow the user to control which cameras use which uplink, which cameras take preference if all uploading at once, etc., multiple LAN with vlan tagging?
This would mean Ring could provide a completely optional product that would alleviate or completely solve some of these issues:
- users hitting a limit on number of cameras they can support due to upload speeds
- events/recordings being lost when the internet was down
- events/recordings being low quality/frames skipped due to poor/insufficient internet connection (especially when more than one camera has motion at the same time)
- user peace-of-mind that they have their recordings in a secondary location if they had an extended outage or something happened at Ring
- still friendly to non savvy users if failover was made nice and quick and possibly a back-sync feature existed so the Ring cloud could get the ring record device back up to speed with events/recordings if it was bypassed/offline for whatever reason
A protect plan should be required to use ring record and set up a ring record device in an existing location
Camera set up would be:
- pin a new certificate for HTTPS connections to a ring record device
- allow a camera to be instructed to stream to that address instead, subject to the certificate matching, falling back to Ring cloud if it were offline/mismatched/500’d etc.
- camera still to send status back to Ring cloud and accept instruction to stop using ring record if recordings don’t appear to be making it back eventually, protect plan lapsed, etc.
App set up would be:
- Have an option to utilise a ring record device if one exists / is fully set up in the same location
- Requests to view events/recordings check the ring record first if on the same network and do similar checks to the certificate check above
Ring Record set up would be:
- it turns on and makes a setup WLAN like a camera
- user sets it up as they do any other ring device and it joins their WLAN (or LAN?) and their location
- it gets a certificate from Ring so the local devices trust it and can be expired with the protect plan
- the additional record settings are configured in the app
- the advanced routing/prioritisation settings are configured in the app
- it just works and if it doesnt work everything falls back to Ring cloud anyway
Please Ring, let me buy more from you!
- Daniel
The benefit to Ring is users that were reluctant to go ‘all cloud’ now have an option that is a bit more sophisticated than ‘whack an sd card slot on the cameras’, and users that want more cameras but don’t have the upload capacity have a solution. More cameras/doorbells sold. More $$$.