Chamberlain goes from garage to front door with Notifi video door chime
The garage-opener maker extends into the smart home with a connected LED-video-camera-doorbell combo device.
The premise behind Notifi makes sense. If you consider the various smart devices already vying for a place for your front door in piecemeal fashion -- mostly by way of connected door bells and video cameras -- why not offer a product that bundles all of those things together?
That's Chamberlain's idea: Notifi is an LED light bulb with a video camera, a door bell and a small wireless bridge to bring the whole operation to an app. The company is essentially offering a competitor to Ring and Skybell , as well as arguably DropCam and other security cameras, with an LED bulb thrown in that makes the whole thing easy to install.
The LED part is key. Unlike Ring and Skybell, Notifi doesn't run on batteries, nor does it require you to hard-wire the system onto your front door. Notifi draws power from the light socket, and that in turn powers the 720p video camera. The doorbell unit is the only piece that requires a battery, and it all talks to your home Wi-Fi network via the bridge device that sits inside your house within range of your front door.
Along with basic real-time viewing capability via an iOS and Android app, the camera can also act as a motion detector. Chamberlain says it will be adding a fee-based cloud storage service so you can watch recorded videos. Pricing for the cloud storage and for the unit itself is to be determined, but the company says it's aware of DropCam's $9.99 a month pricing for 1080p video storage, and that its expects both the price for its storage service and for the device itself will be competitive when Notifi hits the market in 2015.
Notifi isn't the only news for Chamberlain at CES 2015. The company will also be building its Wi-Fi-based MyQ Garage connectivity directly into a new garage opener. That goes along with the Chamberlain MyQ Garage add-on smart garage device that the company debuted in 2013. Chamberlain has not announced pricing for the new opener, but expect it to show up at retail shortly.