Smart Home Cameras From Amazon, Google Could Soon Work Together

(Bloomberg) — Until now, buying a smart home camera has largely meant committing to one company’s ecosystem. Purchase one brand, and it’s difficult to switch later without replacing everything.

Matter, the smart home interoperability standard that helps devices from a range of manufacturers play nicely together, is looking to address that pain point by expanding to support video cameras for the first time.

The news was announced Thursday by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or CSA, a consortium of tech companies that has sought to make it easier for consumers to mix and match different brands’ smart home gadgets, such as thermostats, door locks and smart lights, addressing a common user complaint.

Theoretically, this could lead to cameras from Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring and Blink units being paired with those from Google Nest and other brands. Moreover, it would allow consumers to access the live video feed of those cameras from third-party platforms such as Apple Inc.’s Home app.

Whether that potential is realized depends on the willingness of Big Tech to adopt the new Matter 1.5 specification in the first place. If companies choose to support the change, the process could take months or years based on past timelines.

A handful of hardware makers, including Samsung Electronics Co., Eve Home, Aqara and U-tec, have pledged their support, the consortium said, with plans to integrate Matter 1.5 into their respective platforms and hardware.

But the heavyweights of the category aren’t revealing their plans just yet. In statements to Bloomberg, Amazon and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, whose backing will be critical if the new specification is going to succeed, would not commit to making their cameras interoperable.

“The launch of Matter 1.5 is a great step forward for the smart home,” a Google spokesperson said. “Our commitment is to ensure that every device type we support with Matter is fast, secure and genuinely helpful.” The company would only confirm that it’s “committed to extending this high level of quality to all Matter device types based on customer demand and need.’

“We regularly incorporate the latest Matter release into our Echo device software (as a Matter controller), but we don’t have a timeline for when we will incorporate the new Matter 1.5 features,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Amazon and Google launched their latest video camera lineups earlier this fall. These are products that only tend to receive hardware updates sporadically. So unless those recent models are updated with support, new Matter-compatible devices might not arrive for a year or more.

“I do anticipate that they’ll take it up,” Tobin Richardson, Chief Executive Officer of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It may just be on different timelines.” 

Both Amazon and Google are part of the CSA, which oversees Matter. Apple and Samsung are also among the consortium’s “promoter” members, which means they have influence over standards development.

The CSA has built the new Matter specification to support a wide mix of designs, including doorbell cameras, indoor and outdoor models, devices with flood lights and nursery monitors. Matter 1.5 is also designed to be backward compatible with hardware already on the market: WiFi, power-over-ethernet and ethernet-based models are all factored in.

The fundamental goal is to let consumers stream live video and audio from their preferred camera on any Matter-enabled device. You could, say, combine an Amazon Ring doorbell and Google Nest indoor camera on the same system and monitor both from Apple’s Home app. Or you could check the feed of an Amazon Blink camera on the go with Google Home. Some of that flexibility is possible today through third-party workarounds, but they’re not always reliable. Matter 1.5 would make this versatility an out-of-the-box feature for many devices. 

But that’s about as far as Matter 1.5 goes, and manufacturers retain plenty of leeway. The new specification doesn’t address storage since manufacturers have different approaches to how they store customer recordings; some favor saving them locally, but most upload them to the cloud. Camera makers also have varying subscription plans depending on included features and the length of time that videos remain available.

For similar reasons, the new standard doesn’t touch upon clip playback or on-device event analysis. Control over these and other features, including artificial intelligence-powered summaries that Amazon and Google have introduced, will be left up to the individual companies. 

This means, in all likelihood, that consumers will still need to use the companion app for each camera to access advanced features, which is similar to the way Matter works across other product categories today. For instance, you can make basic temperature adjustments on a Nest Thermostat using the Apple Home app on an iPhone, but other options are more limited compared with Google’s own software.

Regardless, Matter 1.5 is poised to become an important milestone in the effort to make smart homes truly cross-compatible — but only if all the key players get on board. Asked when the first compatible video cameras might hit the market, Richardson said “I wish I could predict that. It will never be fast enough for my liking.”

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