With the new ‘Basic August Video Recording’ subscription, the doorbells will save the last 24 hours of video to August’s servers, with access to view it through the August app. Premium paid plans offer larger storage quotas.
As always, the smart doorbell can send alerts to your iPhone when someone rings the bell, or use motion sensitive triggers to fire off alerts.
The announcement today means it is possible to go back through the last day of footage from the camera, almost like adding a mini CCTV system to your front door. Video recording can now take place passively, and you can scroll back through time to see what happened later. The August app lets you replay video right on your phone, download it to your photo library and share it with others.
For free, August will save the last 24 hours of footage. Upgrade to a Premium plan to save video for longer. August is charging $4.99 a month to store videos in their cloud for up to 30 days. If you want to keep clips for longer, you’ll need to manually save them out of the August app and into your iPhone’s storage.
Ring, its closest competitor, charges $3 a month per camera to store video for up to 60 days, but it doesn’t have a free plan (yet?). This does give August a bit of a leg up although as this market gets more competitive, we’d expect prices to drop across all the manufacturers.
The video recording features work with both the August Doorbell Cam and Doorbell Cam Pro, but the Pro model features a better quality camera with integrated floodlight for better quality low-light video.
