Amazon is overhauling its subscription offering for its Ring video doorbells and cameras.
A brand new service called Ring Home Premium will include features like 24/7 recording and AI-powered video search and can start at $19.99 per 30 days when it launches within the US on November fifth. The cheaper tiers, Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Basic, offer several features, but no 24/7 recording or updated search.
Ring's subscription redesign comes because the Amazon subsidiary is riding high under latest CEO Liz Hamren, a former Microsoft executive. Ring is now the second largest provider of security systems within the USA. after to research firm Parks Associates, which recently became profitable, Hamren told Bloomberg in May — six years after Amazon acquired the corporate for $1 billion.
Ring's latest subscription plans
The old Ring Protect Basic plan becomes Ring Home Basic ($4.99 per 30 days). Ring Protect Plus becomes Ring Home Standard ($9.99 per 30 days). And Ring Protect Pro becomes Ring Home Standard with skilled alarm monitoring ($19.99 per 30 days) or Ring Home Premium, depending on what the client chooses.
All Ring Home subscribers receive people and package alerts, video preview alerts (short GIF previews of camera motion alerts), and 180 days of video event history. Ring Home Standard customers can watch video streams as much as half-hour long using “Enhanced Live View”; It is a continuous stream for Ring Home Premium. And each Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Premium subscribers receive “Doorbell Calls,” notifications that seem like a call in your phone when a visitor presses the doorbell.
For some Ring owners, the changes are a little bit of a mixed bag.
Starting November 5, Ring Protect Pro subscribers will lose their local video storage, web backup, and Amazon's Eero Secure Suite. If they don't have a Ring Alarm or Ring Alarm Pro device, they will even lose SOS emergency assistance.
All these features and more – including Various monitoring functions of Amazon's household robot Astro are actually hidden behind Ring Home Premium.
For latest customers with a Ring Alarm or Ring Alarm Pro, Amazon will even charge $10 per 30 days (starting November 5) for the skilled alarm monitoring mentioned above. (Ring Home Premium doesn’t include it.) Ring Protect Pro customers subscribed to Virtual Security Guard, Amazon's $99 per 30 days enterprise security plan with call center monitoring, get this free of charge, as do Ring Protect Plus subscribers with Add-On. on “Virtual Security Guard”.
All Ring Alarm and Ring Alarm Pro owners will robotically be upgraded to Ring Home Standard with skilled alarm monitoring starting March 1, 2025. This effectively doubles the subscription price for patrons who previously signed up for Ring Protect Plus, which was $10 per 30 days – but Amazon says they will cancel the Alarm Pro monitoring add-on before the change.
To mitigate the blow, Amazon is offering existing Ring Protect Pro customers a one-year trial of Ring Home Premium with skilled alarm monitoring. To maintain alarm monitoring after the trial ends, subscribers must pay full price: $10 per 30 days plus $19.99 per 30 days for Ring Home Premium.
AI-powered search
According to Amazon, one in all Ring Home Premium's key features, intelligent video search, might help users find specific moments in recorded video footage. Smart Video Search will probably be available in public beta to pick Ring customers starting Wednesday, allowing you to enter searches into the Ring app to pinpoint notable moments.
“You could seek for 'raccoon within the backyard last night' and find the reply to why those trash cans were knocked over,” wrote Eric Kuhn, Amazon GM of Ring Experiences, in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “If you seek for 'red bike within the driveway,' you would possibly come across lovely videos of your oldest child teaching your youngest to ride a motorbike.”
Initially, intelligent video search is proscribed to searches about animals, places, packages, people, time, vehicles, weather and activities (e.g. jumping, running, playing or riding). Amazon said it has implemented safeguards to dam searches for potentially offensive or harmful content and can refine the search feature over time.
Amazon has not said what steps, if any, it has taken to mitigate potential biases within the AI models that power Smart Video Search.
A study An MIT study published in August found that commercially available models like OpenAI's GPT-4 usually tend to recommend calling the police when shown Ring videos taken in minority communities. The study also found that when the models analyzed footage from majority-white neighborhoods, they were less prone to describe scenes using terms like “cloaking the property” or “burglary tool.”
“Ring is a frontrunner in providing privacy features to customers, and we’re also committed to developing responsible AI,” Kuhn wrote. “We have a protracted history of listening and learning from our customers.”
The launch of Smart Video Search precedes that of Google promised AI updates to its Nest cameras and doorbells, which supply detailed captions for camera recordings and similar natural language search features.
