Dropcam Adds Timelapse Recording

There was a lot of interest and discussion about a recent Axis timelapse app and rival offerings.

Now, here's a new feature from Dropcam that is pretty interesting (see their feature overview). It's a free / included software feature for recorded video and it comes with an option for "'Smart Timelapse' which slows the video at points of detected motion activity."

Below is a user sample clip compressing 24 hours into 2 minutes:

The main drawback is that it only does a timelapse over a period of 1 day. Many commercial users want timelapse over weeks or months (for ongoing projects, etc.). However, since this feature is now just in beta, it would ot be surprising if they eventually expanded it.

From a competitive standpoint, this demonstrates 2 things:

• That Dropcam (or any focused software company) can continue to roll out new value added features in the cloud. Contrast this to Axis AVHS which has made little progress on their video management capabilities.
• How Dropcam has an opportunity to expand into adjacent verticals / niches. This is a risk to a company like Earthcam which charges a ton for such time lapse services.