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In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit

• jen20 1y ago
  This is the reason I refused to buy Nanit cameras, instead opting for unconnected models. E2E encryption is table stakes.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    By the way you dont need a video (or hell even audio) baby monitor. Source: 2 kids.
    • NetOpWibby 1y ago
      Same here. I wonder if the market is for first-time parents and people who work 8+ hour days.
      • wltr 1y ago
        I used to work with my laptop, sitting near my baby. Also, I used a timer to follow 45m sleep patterns, so technically there’s no need to react to anything within first 45m, but most times first 1h30m (45+45m).
    • glitchcrab 1y ago
      Of course you don't _need_ it, but it's a useful convenience. Due to the layout of our house it was quite hard to hear my toddler if he was crying in the middle of the night - we often wouldn't wake up to it. So the monitor was very helpful.
      • rpcope1 1y ago
        Why on earth do you need an app and a camera? The same basic VTech audio monitors that are basically the same for many decades now work great, don't cost a fortune and there's no question of "where is this data going?" It's all just a big cash grab for people who need chincy tech toys for a non-problem that's better solved with way more simple kit.
        • glitchcrab 1y ago
          You misunderstand; we're on the same wavelength. I'm not talking about an app, I'm talking about a basic audio baby monitor.
        • Aurornis 1y ago
          > Why on earth do you need an app and a camera? The comment you’re replying to literally started by saying you don’t need it.
    • jen20 1y ago
      Of course you don’t need it. But it’s very useful, especially living in a house with a layout that doesn’t lend itself to hearing a pin drop in the next room. The v-tech ones are fine though. No need for anything with an Internet connection (though some of them even do now). Source: also 2 kids.
• sbrother 1y ago
  As a happy customer, I picked nanit because it actually worked. We didn’t even use the “smart” features, but “you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work” is unfortunately a bar that no competitor I tried could meet. The others were mostly made by non-software companies with outsourced apps that worked maybe 50% of the time. I wish we could have local-first and e2ee consumer software for this sort of thing, but given the choice of that or actually usable software, I am going to pick the latter.
  • vlovich123 1y ago
    The vtech camera is working well enough for me for what it’s worth. But any such app solution generally implies transfer through the company’s servers.
    • sbrother 1y ago
      Yeah that’s fair, we had one of those too which absolutely did everything it advertised. The nanit is a different product that doubles as a home camera that lets you monitor your home while you’re away. Its software/networking is impressively reliable.
    • hippo22 1y ago
      It seems possible to establish a p2p connection with the camera where the company servers act as a broker.
  • varenc 1y ago
    I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit which is a convenient and a more user friendly way to access it. And HomeKit also gives you out-of-home access with a hub. I love my setup, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to a non-techie friend, especially if they're sleep deprived from their infant. But I do miss the lack of any baby-specific features like sleep tracking. It has support for crying detection, but that's it.
• kdamica 1y ago
  We've used an offline Infant Optics baby camera for three kids and have never wished for any of the smart features that online cameras offer. You really just want to know whether they are asleep and when they are crying. I just don't see a good use case for recording all that video for most kids. (I'm sure there are special needs situations where it is helpful)
• cbg0 1y ago
  > Self-hosted video isn't that hard Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.
  • unethical_ban 1y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?
    • sokoloff 1y ago
      Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents. The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.
      • chii 1y ago
        It's more that a typical parent has not thought of the need to have a baby monitor, until they have a baby (in which case, they're too busy to build out their own baby monitor stack). Pay money to solve a problem and time-save as a parent is a valid business idea/strategy. The externalities that the parents might suffer if these businesses do not completely adhere to good security practices don't seem to come back to bite them (and most parents get lucky and not have any bad consequences - yet).
      • unethical_ban 1y ago
        There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected. If there is no easy-to-use baby monitor which is not cloud-connected, that is a market problem, not a technical problem.
        • Aurornis 1y ago
          > There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected. A common use case for baby monitors is being able to wander short distances away and still listen in: Work in yard, talk to a neighbor, go out to the detached garage. Having a baby monitor which is not tethered to the WiFi coverage is a selling point. Many cheap monitors are WiFi connected or use their own WiFi network and the range is limited. A lot of people in this thread are also completely missing the selling points of Nanit which include breathing tracking and sleep tracking features. It’s a product that could technically be implemented locally with enough extra processing power and cloud servers for coordinating out of home access and bouncing notifications, but obviously the number of people who would pay extra for that (instead of trying to roll their own solution HN style) is not large.
• spockz 1y ago
  We just used ipcams with our kids. Now with ubiquity it is dead simple to setup also storage for it. I think synology supports anything that emits rtsp. Baby monitors around here -Alecto is a popular brand - cost twice as much and have only half the capabilities.
• chrismorgan 1y ago
  > Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Your way of phrasing it makes it sound like it would be fine to upload the video if it were end-to-end-encrypted. I think this is worth clarifying (since many don’t really understand the E2EE trade-off): E2EE is for smart clients that do all the processing, plus dumb servers that are only used for blind routing and storage. In this instance, it sounds like Nanit aren’t doing any routing or (persistent) storage: the sole purpose of the upload is offloading processing to the cloud. Given that, you can have transport encryption (typically TLS), but end-to-end encryption is not possible. If you wanted the same functionality with end-to-end encryption, you’d need to do the video analysis locally, and upload the results, instead of uploading the entire video. This would presumably require more powerful hardware, or some way of offloading that to a nominated computer or phone.
  • BrandoElFollito 1y ago
    In other words, E2EE requires two or more clients, and only on these clients the information is in clear. In the case of this product, there is only one client (and a server). E2EE bills then down to having the traffic encrypted like you have with a https website.
    • pcl 1y ago
      No, this doesn't get at the point of end-to-end encryption. Better to look at it in terms of the parties involved -- E2EE implies that there are two or more parties, and that only some of those parties should have unencrypted access. In the case in point, the parent (camera owner) is one party and Nanit is another party. (Prior to the work in the linked post, AWS S3 was another party). The goal of E2EE is to deny plaintext access to some of these parties. So, in an E2EE deployment, Nanit (and AWS) would not have unencrypted access to the video content, even though they're storing it. As chrismorgan pointed out, if Nanit did not have access to the unencrypted data, they could not do server-side video processing. (Also, FWIW, there are multiple clients in this scenario -- the parents' phones are clients, and need unencrypted access to the video stream.) (As an aside, where I used to work, we did some cool stuff with granting conditional access to certain server-side subsystems, so that the general data flow was all end-to-end encrypted, but customers could allow certain of our processes to be "ends" and have key access. This was really elegant; customers could dial in the level of server-side access that we had, and could see via the key authorization metadata which services had that access.)
• bee_rider 1y ago
  I actually don’t really get the point of a cloud service for this. Aren’t babies usually left in situations where there’s at least one trusted adult locally available?
  • thaumasiotes 1y ago
    Yes, the normal solution to wondering how a baby is doing is to look over at it.
    • afro88 1y ago
      24/7?
      • ragebol 1y ago
        > There is usually no noise or evidence of struggle from [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS So, 24/7 kinda, yeah... Realistically, the risk is relatively low I'd say, so to still stay a functioning parent with other duties (for baby or otherwise), you don't look 24/7
  • avereveard 1y ago
    Leading cause of death under one year is sudden infant death syndrome which happens mostly at nap time, situations where the adult may need rest, self care or housekeeping. You cannot fathomly watch an infant 24/7 especially if one parent is working and there's minimal support sistem (living far from relative, working grandparents etc)
    • breakingcups 1y ago
      "Measures not shown to be useful include positioning devices and baby monitors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS
      • lupire 1y ago
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  "Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution" I don't understand this attitude, sure its easy for some people but MOST people want an easy out of the box solution its nothing wrong with that
• mschuster91 1y ago
  > Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution. It's not that easy. The only usecase that is actually really fucking easy is when both the camera and the device trying to access it is in the same network - broadcasts for discovery, that's it. Although I've seen people turn on "client isolation" in their wifi back when I did computer repairs, so it's not a given that this works! But as soon as that assumption goes out the window - and if it's just you going into the garden to check on some weeds where the wifi doesn't reach - the task suddenly becomes so, so much harder: - the "easiest" case is an ISP that hands your wifi router a globally routed IPv4 address, allows UPnP to be configured, and the user has UPnP configured. All that the camera has to do here is to request a port opening and that's it. Still, you as manufacturer need a server to store a mapping between user, IP address and port. (And you need to hope that the user's mobile device or their ISP doesn't have a nasty firewall blocking non-standard ports) - No UPnP? Now you as manufacturer either need some STUN/TURN server or explain to the user how to manually enable port forwarding. - Worst case: the user's ISP either has IPv6 only, CGNAT, double/triple/... NAT or similar shit in play because they don't have enough IP addresses to supply to their customer base. That's pretty much impossible even with STUN/TURN, sooo many ways for things to go wrong along the path. - even a theoretical fully IPv6 world where everyone has globally routed IPv6 addresses everywhere and all ISPs have their routing working still wouldn't solve the issue... because consumer ISP routers enable a firewall on IPv6 to avoid stuff like "online game cheaters 0wning their opponents running an outdated version of their game". The sad reality is, running a cloud service is the only actually pain-free way for any given smart Thing to work as the customer expects it. And on top of that, a NAS capable of storing video costs about 300-ish bucks with a HDD capable of running 24/7 and eats about 10-ish watts of electricity, which is quite the cost factor on its own. Sure, the "nerd population" here on HN can rig something up that works in a matter of a few days, including some rudimentary AI to spot if the baby managed to escape the crib. But the 99% of people out there will crash at the "please open your router's config page to allow UDP port 65535 passthrough" step, if only because they forgot the password that they set five years ago.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > But as soon as that assumption goes out the window - and if it's just you going into the garden to check on some weeds where the wifi doesn't reach - the task suddenly becomes so, so much harder: Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area. Being able to visit the neighbors or go out in the yard without worrying about missing baby monitor events is a huge advantage that many parents will pay for. I think this entire comment section is a prime example of HN not understanding non-technical audiences.
• afro88 1y ago
  > Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution It sounds like they're not hosting it though. They are processing it, and storing it temporarily while it's queued. A fully self hosted AI powered baby monitor that accurately detects sleep states and danger situations would be incredibly expensive today. Maybe not in a few years though.
• sintax 1y ago
  Now imagine all that video/audio footage being used/sold for AI training data.
• mherkender 1y ago
  I run a Unifi Protect setup, local only. They don't provide a display, so I put a Raspberry Pi, a display, and an audio hat in an enclosure. It plays an rtsp stream from the camera at startup and works pretty well.
  • JCM9 1y ago
    +1 for Unifi. They’ve added “baby crying” to the audio monitoring for triggering alerts. Everything is kept local on your LAN. Can access remotely via an app if you wish, but that’s simply accessing the device on your LAN so no dumping all your footage into some random “cloud.” Stuff just works and requires no subscription so all your money goes towards better quality hardware.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > You must spend an additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?) I made a simple wood mount and painted it to match the crib. It worked well. There was no software enforcement requiring you to buy their mount at the time. Has this changed recently?
• lunias 1y ago
  You'll never convince me that the term "cloud" came into existence for any purpose other than to separate itself from "the internet". That way, normal people who were very steadfast for years about not putting personal information on the internet would start putting their personal information in the "cloud".