During the presentation of HomeKit Secure Video (in June 2019 during WWDC), Netatmo was one of the first partners with the Smart Video Doorbell. The connected doorbell equipped with a camera was released on the market in January 2021 at a price of 299,99 €without the support of Apple’s secure video recording technology, but with the promise that it was coming.
In fact, it will never be the case: Netatmo has just published a ticket explaining the reasons why this doorbell will definitely be deprived of Apple’s technology. It’s all regarding temperature… The manufacturer’s doorbell has been designed so that it consumes as little as possible, ie 2W, which makes it compatible with a wide range of electrical circuits for doorbells.
But since this kind of product is necessarily outdoors, it is exposed to the sun and therefore to heat. To preserve the internal components while maintaining the lowest possible consumption, Netatmo has developed a system for detecting people by analyzing two images per second (the doorbell incorporates its own intelligent analysis solution).
HomeKit Secure Video analyzes the video stream from a camera on a HomeKit hub (iPad, Apple TV, or HomePod). Apple has very strict hardware requirements, and meeting them requires the doorbell’s encryption system to run continuously at a high frame rate. HomeKit Secure Video must thus be able to encrypt a video at 30 FPS, which means multiplying by 15 the video capture frequency of the device.
In the lab, in a controlled environment, the doorbell supports this frequency, but in real life this new encryption has a significant impact on energy consumption and therefore on the internal temperature of the product. A heat that causes slowdowns, even untimely restarts.
Despite Netatmo’s efforts to find a solution, the company preferred to drop the case: ” optimizations do not allow for this kind of advanced video recording, while simultaneously supporting high Wi-Fi activity and on-the-fly video encryption needed for compatibility with HomeKit Secure Video ».
Customers who have already purchased a Smart Video Doorbell on the promise of this compatibility are therefore Gros-Jean as before. Nevertheless, Netatmo announces that by the end of the year, they will benefit from an Advanced Recording function which starts the recording of the video a few seconds before the arrival of a person in front of the door (the video can be recorded locally or in the cloud). This unfortunate experience also improved the algorithms at the heart of the product.
Not sure that this is enough to calm the legitimate anger of buyers (Netatmo was not aware of Apple’s requirements from the start?).
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