I feel differently about that. (And it is possible that it is just because I don't understand what Snoo does)
To view a baby camera over the internet someone has to run a server. To run that server costs money. (If you think that the actual server/bandwidth cost is negligible, make sure to also include the cost of keeping the team employed to maintain those servers.) Someone has to pay for that. Based on what you say it sounds like the Nanit baby camera degrades gracefully to the local only features if you don't pay the subcription. That is kind of the only honest way to run a business with a connected component.
As long as they were up-front about this at purchase I can't see a problem with that.
How is this different from Snoo? Quite frankly I don't see how the baby rocking function requires a remote connection. It should be totally implemented locally inside the basinet and there should be no on-going cost. Therefore the only reason they might lock the feature away is due to greed.
> To view a baby camera over the internet someone has to run a server.
In an alternate universe with better technology, this would not be true. You'd connect to a host over the WAN just as you connect over the LAN. Unfortunately ISPs and firewalls and NAT have made this much more difficult and complicated than it should be.
My heart aches when I think about how many company servers are out there running only to facilitate "doing X with your LAN, but from the Internet".
My point is that the app does that for free even from a distance. It’s simply website access that costs even though it should have 0 more marginal cost
The Dormi baby monitor app works extremely well, and you can install it on any old smartphone to repurpose as a baby monitor. For my son, I just velcroed an outdated phone with a worn out battery to the wall. It is really well designed because it also notifies if the connection is lost or if anything goes wrong, which a lot of expensive commercial cameras don't.
It has a few bells and whistles that are worth having. We combined a Nanit camera and an Owlet sleep sock and that gave us god peace-of-mind at night. I only wish we’d topped it off with an analog walkie talkie as a backup in case the Wi-Fi went down.
We used a similar setup, but opted for two sets of analog walkie talkies (instead of one set), so that we could fall back to the secondary set if the batteries ran out in the first set (we replaced the batteries in the two sets of walkie talkies at one-month offsets so that they wouldn't run out at the same time). We also had the two sets running on different channels, to avoid concurrent outages caused by unexpected radio interference. We did the math afterwards; overall availability of the child monitoring system was four nines. Satisfactory.
That being said if you know how to run docker you can just proxy the video feed to vlc pretty easily but most parents don’t have the time for that