With the every breach of cloud hosted smart security cameras, it becomes more and more obvious that any smart cameras in your home should be ran in a local only mode. For most smart security cameras, this is not a feature they support. However, Reolink is one of the brands that happens to support running smart cameras in a local only mode. For more cameras that support local only, check out our post about local only smart cameras.
Running your smart cameras in local only mode can be a bit more technically challenging and require a bit more maintenance. However, you’ll have the benefits of increased privacy, significantly less risk of a security breach, and no reliance on cloud services to be up. With the reports of cloud service employees watching videos, the news of images leaking to folks they shouldn’t be, and internet outages in general – not to mention cloud services shuttering and disappearing, going local for security cameras is really the best way to go.
This usually involves having smart cameras that are not battery powered, and can support the RTSP protocol for feeding their data to a NVR ( basically, a video recorder for security cameras ). The NVR then stores any video feeds you need, and can be configured to alert when you need it to.
This video is a quick demo of how to setup the Reolink brand cameras with an Reolink NVR. It shows how quick and easy this setup process is, making it achievable for someone of any technical skill level.
