Does Ring Offer 24/7 Recording? (Ring PROMISED This In 2018…) – New Video

Back in 2018, Ring promised that you would soon be able to pay extra for 24/7 recording from all “wired” Ring devices (such as the Ring Pro and Ring Floodlight Cam).

However it’s now 2021 and… Ring still doesn’t offer continuous 24/7 recording features. This is disappointing but unsurprising – Ring has been promising HomeKit support for more than half a decade, something which still hasn’t been added.

This video explores why Ring doesn’t offer 24/7 recording, and what features (sort of) make up for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJMaaRrQLRk&ab_channel=SmartHomePoint

At the end of this video, I explore some alternative products that do offer 24/7 recording – as my blog covers more here.

The video timestamps are:

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:52 No, Ring don’t offer 24/7
• 2:01 So what do you get?
• 3:24 What can you do instead?

Video Transcript

Hello, I’m Tristan from Smart Home Point. Back in 2018, Ring announced a range of new features – including the ability to set our wired Ring devices to record continuously – in other words, 24/7. This would be for an extra fee and it would DEFINITELY be released in 2019. Well, it’s now 2021 aaand.. Ring still doesn’t offer 24/7 recording.

Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising – Ring unfortunately have a history of announcing features that they never release. “Yes, we’ll soon be releasing HomeKit support” said Ring more than half a decade ago… did they release it? Uhm, let me see… That’s a no. Of course, Amazon did purchase Ring after the original promise and it probably wouldn’t benefit Amazon if HomeKit support was adopted. Just saying.

Anywhoo, back to the main point: the short answer to this video is that Ring does NOT offer 24/7 recording capability – despite a random blog incorrectly claiming that they do offer this. It’s not clear why Ring never delivered this feature – it might be that the cameras and doorbells have a hardware issue (such as overheating) that prevents 24/7 recording. Or maybe it’s simply that Ring worked out that it’d cost them too much money to deliver the feature. After all, it’d cost more for video storage, and extra software support would be required too. And only a fraction of customers would pay extra for continuous recording. So some business person at Ring probably calculated on a spreadsheet that the cost-benefit ratio was… not good. I dunno, I don’t have an MBA.

Oh no, the BCR projection for 24/7 recording would be negative. We’re doomed! Nigel, kill the 24/7 feature. No I don’t care about the customers – just promise them HomeKit support again. That’ll probably shut them up.

So if you don’t get constant recordings with Ring, what do you get? Well, Ring DOES offer snapshot captures which are low-res photos that get taken between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. These help to fill in the timeline, so that you get a rough view of what’s happening near your camera. Equally you can increase the recording length of videos up to 2 minutes, and also increase the motion sensitivity so that more recordings take place. This is all pretty decent, because if your Ring device is pointed at an area that people walk past frequently, you will get quite a lot of recordings. Finally you can use linked devices, so that when one of your devices detects motion, all your other devices start recording too. What this all means is that my Ring Doorbell actually records over a hundred times a day, and sometimes 5 or 6 times in a 10 minute period.

However none of this is perfect, and it certainly isn’t comparable to 24/7 recording. You will miss some important events. Even something as simple as someone moving your bins at the edge of the motion area, or someone running past quickly, will probably get missed. Plus Ring devices often have a ‘cool down period’ between recording events, meaning that sometimes an important bit of motion won’t get recorded if your Ring camera has just stopped recording.

So what can you do? Well, if continuous recording is important to you, you’ll probably have to look at other products. The Nest Hello doorbell offers genuine 24/7 recording under the Nest Aware Plus plan which is $120 a year (the basic Nest Aware plan is $60 a year).

However if you’re set on a Ring doorbell, you could always install a separate 24/7 camera nearby and you then get the best of both worlds: the convenience of a Ring doorbell, and the protection of 24/7 recordings. A traditional CCTV camera will work fine for this, and also some smart cameras from Eufy and Arlo also offer 24/7 recording as my blog covers (I’ve put a link to that post in the description). Finally, a camera from Annke will also offer 24/7 video and many of their products offer 4K resolution which delivers high image quality.

And that just about wraps up today’s video. To recap, none of Ring’s doorbells or cameras offer continuous recordings. If this is important to you, either get the Nest Hello doorbell or rely on a separate 24/7 camera. I hope you found this video useful. If you did please click the thumbs up button which will tell YouTube that more people should see this video. Please also consider subscribing to my channel and clicking the bell icon which will notify you when I release new videos. Thank you!