Let’s start with some bad news: Amazon stops Cloud Cam support this year. The company launched the proprietary security camera system in 2017, but after only five years on the market, the store will close forever. The good news is that you will not be left without the option of a security camera, as Amazon offers affected customers a Blink Mini for free.
As reported by MacRumors, Amazon will end support for Cloud Cam products and apps on December 2, 2022. When they say “ending support”, they also mean it: When the deadline hits, your cameras and their apps will stop working and all data will be deleted, including all your saved recordings. It gives you about six months to save all videos from your Cloud Cam app before they are gone forever.
If you are a happy Cloud Cam user, this news may come as a bit of a shock. Most of us do not expect a product to become totally useless when the manufacturer of that product arbitrarily decides “it’s time.” After all, most technology can be used or recycled after a company drops support. Although you may not receive updates or new features, you can usually expect to use some or all of the features you originally paid for, at least until the product stops working on its own. Not this time.
Amazon will give you a Blink Mini for your Cloud Cam
Based on the comment sections in articles reporting this news, it seems that customers feel a bit burned by this business practice. Amazon presumably saw it coming, and they seem to be trying to mitigate the blow by offering a free transition to Blink, the camera company Amazon bought the same year they launched Cloud Cam. As long as your Cloud Cam has been active for the last six months, you are eligible to receive one Blink Mini (typically $ 34.99) for each active Cloud Cam device in your account. Additionally, if you have a Cloud Cam Key Edition, you will receive both a Blink Mini and a fourth generation of Echo.
You will also receive one one year subscription to Blink Subscription Plus, which usually runs $ 10 per. month / $ 100 per. year. Once the year is over, you can decide if you want to renew the subscription, switch to the Basic level for $ 3 per. month / $ 30 per. years, or not subscribe at all, which will significantly limit the usability of the Blink Mini. But if all you want are essential features like live viewing, motion alarms and two-way audio, the free plan should work for you.
You can get your free Blink Mini via email: Amazon should send a message to the email address associated with your Cloud Cam account, with detailed instructions on how to claim your new cameras, as well as yours new Echo if you are qualified.
Unfortunately, this is about the only step you can take as a Cloud Cam user. Because Amazon requires the use of the Cloud Cam app to use these cameras, the devices will stop working on December 2nd. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack them to at least save them from the junk pile, but until then, it’s a frustrating story for several reasons. It makes me hesitant to buy any product that requires an app or an account to work; smart devices are a good example, but cloud gaming is another.
Roof Kingdom hearts games on the Nintendo Switch, for example: When you buy these titles on Switch, you are not buying the game, you have only bought access to stream the game via the cloud. If you have a good internet connection, it may work fine at first, but what happens when they one day shut down the servers for your game? If Nintendo had made the games available as a physical copy or a download, you would be fine, but because you do not actually own a copy, you are unlucky.
These types of business practices are worrying, for sure. I’m okay with subscriptions in theory, as long as they justify the cost. But I’m not happy about throwing technology away just because a company decides they do not want me to use it anymore.