Surveillance cameras have always been Homekit's ugly duckling, since they do not offer us the same remote functions that we can find through light bulbs, plugs or any other type of smart device. In addition, most manufacturers force us to hire space in their cloud if we want to talk the recordings for a while.
At the opening conference of WWDC 2019, the guys from Cupertino, aware of both problems, announced Secure Video, a service that Apple makes available to users who use manufacturers authorized by Apple (Netatmo, Logitech and Eufy for now), and that allows you to store videos generated by surveillance cameras for free for 10 days.
According to Craig Federighi, most security cameras upload videos to the cloud to analyze and enable motion detection functions, whether we want to or not, they are beyond our control. With HomeKit Secure Video, supported cameras will take advantage of iPad, Apple TV, or HomePod to analyze the video directly in our home.
All video sources will end-to-end encrypt the images and upload them to iCloud, where only the owner of that account will have access. Like most surveillance cameras currently available on the market, Apple will send notifications if it detects activity to be able to review the recordings in a faster and above all, safe way.
This new HomeKit plan offers 10 days of free storage in iCloud that will not count towards the limits of the storage space that we have contracted. Yes indeed, We will not be able to do it with the free 5 GB plan that Apple makes available to us. Nor with the 50 GB.
If we want to take advantage of this function, we need our storage plan is 200GB or higher for a single camera. If we have more cameras with a maximum limit of 5, the necessary plan to be able to store the recordings in our iCloud account without taking up space of the plan we have contracted, the storage plan must be 2 TB.
A new service from Apple
This movement, we can see it as one more service offered by Apple. It will always be better and more comfortable to pay the 2,99 euros for 200 GB, from which we can take much advantage, with our photos and documents to be able to access the recordings of our cameras, than to pay for a similar service that only allows us store the videos generated by your device.