Thanks for taking the time to provide a good overview of the system capabilities. Going back to the bulletized list of Xfinity issues, I began to think that some issues might be endemic within the industry, while others might be "fixable." I wonder if IPVM readers can share their expectations on which might be endemic?

My guess is,

  • Internet speed penalty (unrelated to monitoring)
  • Touchscreen glitchy (another provider might fix this)
  • False motion still a problem (not sure, another provider _might_ fix this)
  • Camera Latency (not sure, another provider _might_ fix this)
  • Camera Selection (another provider might fix this, especially if augmented with local recording)

Recently, IPVM had a good discussion (Useless As Evidence, Judge Rejects Video) that addressed some motion capture and retention issues. I have come to feel that a more robust capability ought to be multilevel. You might locally record and retain 100% of the video, but with detected motion somehow flagged so that after one or two days, non-motion-flagged video is discarded, then after greater interval or when storage is full, the oldest motion-flagged video will be discarded. This seems to offer robust utility with low probability of failed capture and storage. I don't know if any VMS or appliance offers such a capability though.

Our video monitoring setups experience camera latency over the internet, but since it's modest (less than 5 seconds) it hasn't raised any issues for us. I'm curious if Mark can characterize the latency he's experiencing, and perhaps even provide an example in which it's material (eg our video latency precludes use as a video phone but doesn't appear to impair other functions).

Reviewing my comments, I may appear to be an apologist for Comcast. For the record, I've not been in a location that required use of Comcast for many years, have no regrets at moving on, and have no affiliation with Comcast. My only thoughts were, it's good to set expectations because there's a possibility that the issues you raise may not be corrected through another vendor, and particularly the ease of use cannot be assumed so you have one good thing going for you. Just thought it might be helpful to explore expectations through the context of the IPVM subscribers, many of whom are deeply knowledgeable within this field.

Again, thanks for taking the time to put together a very thorough and clear treatment. I really enjoyed and learned from it.