Blink, Amazon’s budget camera brand, has introduced two paid AI tiers that sit above its long-running Basic and Plus feature plans. The new Basic AI plan is priced at $6.99/month or $69.99/year and the Plus AI plan at $19.99/month or $149.99/year. Subscribers gain video descriptions, a single event alert that stitches related motion clips into one notification, known faces, and an unusual event alert for activity that falls outside normal patterns. Video descriptions and Single Event Alerts (just released) are available now; the additional AI features will roll out over the coming months.
AI Subscriptions Subsidize Hardware for Now
AI, not hardware, is now the core competitive differentiator in smart video. Smart home manufacturers are highlighting advanced AI features in product release announcements, such as, pet tracking, stranger interaction, object classification, descriptive alerts, AI daily summaries, and threat level classifications. Security system companies are also including AI as an added layer to determine which events should be escalated to human agents in central stations.
Consumers also see broad value in AI-driven video features, led by theft alerts and advanced analytics to make alerts more meaningful. Parks Associates research shows that 39% of smart video device owners and intenders consider it highly valuable for AI to proactively engage with people at the door to understand their intent or deter them from harmful or criminal activity.
A central dilemma impacting hardware manufacturers in this new landscape is which features to allow free to the end user, and which features to gate behind a subscription. While most AI features will experience commoditization rapidly, manufacturers who offer high quality analytics in the cloud for an additional fee are better suited to handle video device commoditization, even if the AI features themselves will no longer be a differentiator on their own. It is the services and the quality of the intelligence that then become the differentiators. If the services connect to a human counterpart, for emergency dispatches, that service and the trust in the brand elevate premium differentiation further. Amazon is currently gating advanced AI features behind premium subscriptions, and adding that to its budget Blink brand gives it an advantage, but other hardware players that add those features at the edge free to the consumer (if the overhead costs are feasible) could undercut that business model.
This is an excerpt from the June update of Parks Associates research service Smart Home and Security Market Tracker.
