Expose Cameras to Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP)

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback. SimpliSafe's cameras are designed to support the SimpliSafe system only. Not to mention that we want to keep a tight lid on video to boost privacy protections for our customers. So at least for now, we won't be opening up our cameras to integration like you're suggesting.

Please add this or Simplisafe will never touch foot in a broader market.

I think you've wildly overestimated how much SimpliSafe customers want, care or even know about RTSP. I think you've also underestimated how many SimpliSafe customers there already are. It's one of the most popular self install security systems in the country already and got there w/o this support.

@anonuser2828 

Your only taking in to consideration residential users. Simplisafe also advertises to the business community. https://simplisafe.com/business-security including a "property management dashboard"

No, I was taking them into account when I made my statement. Per the link you supplied SimpliSafe has helped almost 100k businesses over a decade. (Read: The total count of customers over a 10 year period, not the actual maximum simultaneous count.) Per this article there were more than 3 million paid subscribers in 2019, up from 2 million in 2018. I think that by any reasonable measure it's fair to say that the number of consumer customers dwarfs the number of business customers. I couldn't find current numbers but even if they lost 50% of their customers the ratio is still overwhelmingly in favor of the consumer.

My point is if they intend on continuing to advertise the usefulness of it for business some additional features such as having the cameras be able to also split into a existing infrastructure of cameras can be a deciding factor.

The company is called SimpliSafe and they've made it very very clear that they want to provide a simple, easy to use product that's easy to get up and running and doesn't overwhelm users with choices. They haven't advertised it as the cadillac solution that can do anything you want and however you want to do it. The kinds of people, business or consumer, who are most likely to be attracted to the SimpliSafe system just don't care that much about what you're asking for. That doesn't make your request a bad one by the way. I'm all for it if they have the time and resources to do it but there are literally hundreds of other things I want them to fix and implement first and I'd bet my house that most users would agree with me on that.

Your comment is no taking into consideration these factors and reasoning.

It is, see above. Consumers vastly outnumber business users, the entire point of the system is to keep it SIMPLE and the number of time RTSP has been mentioned here ore in http://reddit.com/r/simplisafe is insignificant. How insignificant? There are 7 hits for RTSP on the official forums and most of those hits are from this thread I believe. There are 2 hits for RTSP on the subreddit. Clearly not that many people are concerned about RTSP in the sample size of 5k+ people that we can observe.

Additionally the only true reasoning @davey_d has is to keep the ecosystem whole crating a split economy since they dont really have any better product offering for a more complete prosumer level of devices and features.

That may be true in part but it's almost certainly more accurate to say that increasing the complexity of their products literally runs contrary to the name of their company and their business model. This isn't rocket science.

Interesting thread. Admittedly, I had to Google RTSP to read up on it and even know what it stands for.  At the end of the day, agree with worthing and Davey.  There many other things I would like SS to prioritize and deliver to their customers.

Just chiming in - as a paying Simplisafe customer, I'd like to replace my current video doorbell with a Simplisafe doorbell, but I won't be doing that until there's an option for RTSP streaming (I'd like to integrate it into my home camera recording system). My current video doorbell streams over RTSP so I can keep video recordings on my local NAS (I don't like using the cloud recordings). If it were available as an option for advanced users (enabled via the settings in the app), I think that would be perfect.

Until that option exists, I'll stick with my current video doorbell :-)

As I work in this space, I agree that an RTSP option would be beneficial for prosumers.  But like others have stated, there are lots of issues and requests I'd like the SimpliSafe dev team to work on first.

Personally, the lack of an RTSP option absolutely will stop me from buying SimpliSafe cameras, because I've already an investment in my VMS system.  Also, I rather like my current cameras (which are decidedly not very consumer friendly, but are the best in the business). 

I find the camera that came with my system useless and it sits on the shelf. Be nice if I could use it with iSpy or similar to be useful.

This might be useful for streaming. Haven't tried it yet.

https://github.com/bachya/simplisafe-python/issues/85

So I really dislike that there is no RTSP and no local connections to the cameras at all in Simplisafe. Sadly, I didn't realize these shortcomings until after I already purchased the system. I would love to move to a more prosumer oriented system. Does anyone have any suggestions?