Once again buyer beware when incorporating cloud stuff.
This has been going on for a while apparently. I don't own any Blink devices but have been tempted in the past.
Now to be fair, it's their cloud / api and they can do with it what they want and you agreed to the TOS. I think if you are using their services you should probably be paying a subscription fee as long as they aren't using you as a "product". If they are then that should be compensation enough. Also - do you really "own" your cloud device?
Over the years this is something I’m been asking myself more and more as i see all sorts of IoT Cloud based companies change their TOS and/or go under rendering the device you payed for useless.
It's about locking you into their platform vs. making it easy to integrate. Google, Apple, Amazon, they all do it. At one time YouTube made their experience really poor on 3rd party devices to get you to use their products and even blocked others from deploying solutions that were superior to their official applications. This is all maddening when you get a solution working and a week later the vendor cuts you off.
I own a bunch of Blink cameras (about a dozen) and I'm thinking of just scrapping them if I can figure out a decent wireless (battery/solar) wifi system. I already have enterprise-grade APs around the property and could put the cameras on their own VLAN. And then I could just feed them into a NAS device and be done with all this BS cloud stuff except for our Alexa devices (which are making me increasingly wary). I wish Blink would allow us to just buy their equipment and control it locally, or that there existed a hack by which we could accomplish that. Has anyone tried RPi Zero cameras with any success?
I have some of the old, original, non-rechargeable Arlos. They eat CR123's like crazy. If I get some free time I think I might try to build a camera with an RPi Zero. But time remains the challenge...
Sounds like what Blink did with RBoy’s smartthings integration right before they were acquired by Amazon in December 2017.
Is it a move? Sure.
Should the author of that article or the Homebridge integration be surprised that Amazon won’t just let 5,000-10,000 people integrate with their cloud in a manner Amazon doesn’t monetize or otherwise manage (even if that’s a trivial # of customers and/or data)? No.
I’m just glad I decided to stop using Blink a couple years ago.
I agree - the real kick in the teeth is that they are collecting data on every API call anyway so are in fact monetizing you. It may eventually happen to Ring and Echo integrations as well.
Do not rely on cloud services for the integral parts of your HA system.
I've got 2 rpi zero w's running using motioneye. I find these to be quite choppy. Seems to me the zero is too underpowered, at least for fluid video.
I've also got two wyze 2 cams running their latest rtsp firmware, currently feeding into motioneye on a rpi 4, and feeding into tinycam Pro for Android. Both feeds work well with no cloud requirement, but some wyze community folks have issues with the firmware.
I'm also playing with a couple of EZViz cameras, feeding into motioneye and tinycam. I can run these cloud free except for initial setup. Also can't use their app once they are on their on lan, but thats were tinycam and motioneye come in.
Amazon Bought Blink shortly before Ring for 1 of 2 reasons:
Eliminate competition for Ring.
Eventually Blink is going to be merged into Ring.
I still have some blinks. but I gave up long ago trying to find a way to integrate them into my HA. Not sure how much money they get off the cat walking across my drive way between 0400 and 0430 every morning, but it really isn't a concern to me.
Someday in the not too distant future, I will begin separating, or at least drastically minimizing Amazon in my life. I truly do not believe Amazon's business model is sustainable over the long term. There was a time they did a few things very very well. Now they do a bunch of thing sorta half heartedly, and even the few things they once did very well, they no longer excel at.
Your comments re the RPi Zero are very helpful and confirm something I feared - that the Zero might not have enough oomph to run motion detection. I may still give it a try for a weather webcam. The RPi 4 would likely perform beautifully, but power consumption is the issue there, as I want to be able to set these up around our property in remote areas.
Blink created a near-perfect product that I would have paid more for, had I been able to keep things entirely local. I wish someone would invent /offer that.
For now. The company as a whole is an unwieldy mess. They will eventually have to focus or fail. What they are doing isnt sustainable over the long term.
move? Sure.
