Raw LLM Responses

Camera manufacturers are pushing cloud cameras hard, and it's working. CCTV installers are increasingly using them because they get lucrative RMR and kickbacks from the manufacturers. You can still get standalone DVR/NVR units for now, but some manufacturers are starting to release cameras that only work with a cloud subscription and are vendor locked in. I design and install CCTV systems and I hate the cloud push. The manufacturers are going full retard on AI features and promising the moon with them. They don't work, and some features are actually illegal in many jurisdictions. Facial recognition, biometric patterning and people tracking can be illegal if you store said data on your servers without the person's consent, but they do it anyway. State governments have passed laws making it illegal, but they're not enforcing it, so the manufacturers just brazenly ignore it. Cloud is also hideously expensive if you want full frame and full resolution available. The default settings are to digest video into smaller morsels that can more easily be stored. So even though you may have an 8 MP camera, the cloud may only be storing 1MP of data that uses AI to decide what is most important in the image to be stored. It misses stuff A LOT. I can't tell you how many times the video footage from the cloud was entirely worthless because it was so degraded from down sampling and the frame rate is so low that you'd actually have more information had you used 25 year old analog cameras and a VCR. Or there's no video at all. It's very common for a network issue to pop up and the local cloud bridge runs out of storage space, so it starts overwriting/dropping video entirely. This can go on for days or even weeks if the bridge isn't being actively monitored, which can be a common problem for large companies. It just gets lost in the abyss of day to day operations, security and technology are always last choice, last minute, 11th hour problems that are left festering away until they're on fire emergencies.