[georgefrick]

I'd say, yes. I've been able to watch that many people see the ring (they see the camera), and they back right off the porch. It's been awesome in this respect, people simply ring it less. As far as the cloud stuff; I'm willing to make that sacrifice so that it can call my phone and i can see/talk to the person at the door. For family I get to literally let them in, and for others I can pretend to be home but uninterested.

[mulmen]

I see the benefit of off-site access but is the cloud a requirement for that? It seems we have conflated the idea of “network enabled” and “cloud based”.

[georgefrick]

From a technical stand point I agree. But the unit needs to open a connection to my phone, which is going to require reaching beyond my home network. It's hard to deliver a product to an end user this way, so in these cases the cloud means 'we manage the hard part for you'. So the cloud isn't a requirement, for well... us? But the average consumer, yes. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. I'd love a version of Ring where I could easily eliminate the middle man; but I recognize the value in what they've done. How we protect privacy sometimes seems to be an argument of confidence (Our own home network security VS a vendors), there are arguments to be made about centralizing some of it?

[mulmen]

I do agree there is an argument to be made for partial centralization. Right now everything is centralized, even some things that I don't think need to be. From a purely technical perspective it seems to me that notification and configuration can be delegated to a third party but the actual video data can remain local.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, because of NAT and needing to setup port forwarding, which most people won’t do.