It all comes down to your needs. What you listed seems pretty simple that anything can do it. Yes, BI seems a little over complicated but I also think its a product of feature creap. Trying to do everything for everybody.
In my case, I have BI integrated with my Hubitat. Some of the things I do that are a bit more andvanced (not saying no system can do some of these).
- pop up a feed on my desktop when I'm working when motion starts at the bottom of my drive way and moves to the top of my drive way (zone crossing)
- AI detection for cars/animals/people
- Change the active profile based on my presence so things like indoor cameras will turn on/off and the same with notifications
- all cameras show up as devices in Hubitat with motion/sound detection triggers that I can then integrate into various routines
- I can integrate the cameras into my dashboards. Looking at putting a small tablet by the back door that shows the feeds so when we let the dog out we can see where he is or if there are other random animals out there.
- very power management of motion detection. You can even view a clip of a triggered event that you don't want to get triggered for and modify the settings live on the clip to filter out what you don't want. For example I tweaked a camera that was getting notified by leaves blowing.
- all my cameras record 24/7 and then I have a copy of them that handle the alerts only. The 24/7 are hidden from the interface so those recordings don't clutter up the alerts.
- ability to control other things from the interface such as the lights on the floodlight cameras.
- 2-way audio via the apps
On top of that it has power management of recordings. You can manage disk space usage and even have it move recordings to other computers for archiving on a schedule. I guess this is more of a commercial thing than it is a home user setting.
I've looked at other solutions and while each of them may have a few of the features they were all missing something that I wanted or it was not fully baked (ex motion trigger for on but not for off) or didn't even have an iphone app which allows this to be a full replacement.
So, yes it is a complicated product but I consider it a power user product. Take some time to figure it out and its pretty cool what it can do. Don't have the time/need, then yes there are a lot of other more simpler products that exist.
