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Aldi just launched its own £16.99 rival to Ring's battery video doorbell – and it's completely subscription-free | TechRadar (www.techradar.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37808020

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[–] 66 points 10 months ago (7 children)

From the listing:

Answer your door from anywhere in the world with this remote viewing Video Doorbell.

So I assume you're not expected to self-host this. Which means they have to run and maintain servers. And $16/person ain't covering the cost of this device + servers indefinitely.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Which means they have to run and maintain servers.

    I'd bet money that it works just like similar devices from Reolink. Local recording to SD Card or NVR. If you want cloud recording then you're paying a monthly subscription.

    This device from Aldi is at a very low pricepoint but it's specs are garbage. 480p recording? In 2025? C'mon...

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  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Then you wouldn't be able to "answer your door from anywhere"...

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    You would if you pay the subscription.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Right, but not if you didn't. Which would be false advertising.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    answer your door from anywhere*

    *Monthly subscription required

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Look at the listing. There is no such caveat.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    you can make very cheap to maintain peer to peer solutions

    you can use a STUN server to discover your public IP and use a method called UDP hole punching to open a port others can connect to. STUN servers are very cheap to run: they don’t actually handle the data; just provide a kind of handshake service in the middle for coordinating

    this is often used for peer to peer video chat etc

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    I'm sure you can. Do you think that's what they expect their users to do? Or that it's something they're going to facilitate?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    there are public STUN servers: just like DNS, STUN is a fairly critical part of modern infrastructure

    peer to peer real time video is a fairly solved problem. the fact that we have google/amazon/zoom/etc in the middle isn’t because it’s necessary

    that having been said, STUN servers are also incredibly cheap to run… i wouldn’t consider it exactly off the cards for a company that’s selling products to support a public STUN server indefinitely… it’s not quite as simple as them having to pay tens of thousands /mo in infrastructure costs to keep the lights on: it’s more like $100/mo, which at numbers that small you’d make back in just interest on the sales you made… but i reckon it could go something like “support for 10 years” and then they release an update that lets you set your own STUN server; perhaps defaulting to a public, free one

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    any chance this can be done through your router/modem, where your phone app connects to external ip of router and is the "server end point" for your doorbell?

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