As the price competition of IPC hardware intensifies, the profit model of value-added services becomes crucial, especially in overseas markets. The era of high gross profit of hardware is gone, while market investment is increasing. In overseas markets, 4G products are a trend in the future, but the current share is not high. Although the conversion rate of cloud storage in overseas markets is higher than that in China, it is only about 10%. When the gross profit of hardware decreases, who can carry the new profit point? From Ring's actions, we can clearly see that it is AI.
Starting from November 5, Ring launched the new "Ring Home Premium" service in the United States, starting at US$19.99 per month, providing users with advanced features such as 24/7 all-weather recording and AI-driven video search. At the same time, Ring also launched the more economical "Ring Home Standard" and "Ring Home Basic" packages. Although they do not include 24/7 recording and advanced search functions, they still include many practical functions.
This subscription service reform is an important strategic move by Ring under the leadership of new CEO Liz Hamren. Hamren, a former Microsoft executive, has breathed new life into Ring, which is now the second-largest security system provider in the U.S., according to research by Parks Associates. More impressively, Hamren told Bloomberg in May that Ring had finally turned a profit six years after being acquired by Amazon for $1 billion.
The specific changes to the new subscription plans are as follows:
The original "Ring Protect Basic" plan has been renamed "Ring Home Basic," with a monthly fee of $4.99.
"Ring Protect Plus" has been upgraded to "Ring Home Standard," with a monthly fee of $9.99.
"Ring Protect Pro" is divided into two options: "Ring Home Standard" with professional alarm monitoring ($19.99 per month) and "Ring Home Premium."
All Ring Home subscribers will enjoy person and package alerts, video preview alerts (short GIF previews of camera motion alerts), and 180 days of video event history. Ring Home Standard users can watch up to 30 minutes of video streams through the "Extended Live View" feature. In addition, Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Premium users will also get the "Doorbell Call" feature, which will send a call-like alert to the user's phone when a visitor rings the doorbell.
We can see Ring's stepped service model, among which I personally think that the AI-driven video search service is the most eye-catching. The "Smart Video Search" feature uses AI technology to allow users to locate specific moments in the video by entering text queries in the Ring app. For example, users can search for "raccoons in the backyard last night" to find out why the trash can was overturned, or search for "red bicycles in the driveway" to find the warm pictures of children learning to ride a bicycle.
Currently, the Smart Video Search feature supports search queries about animals, locations, packages, people, time, vehicles, weather, and activities (such as jumping, running, playing or riding). Amazon said that they have implemented security measures to prevent searches for potentially offensive or harmful content, and will continue to optimize this feature over time.
In fact, when the AI big model just became popular, we expected to be able to use the AI multimodal big model capabilities to intelligently analyze the content and events of the video, and to achieve it through simple operations according to which video and event the user wants to search. Now that Ring has launched this feature, we, as IPC manufacturers, must seize this window of opportunity and rapidly promote this service, which will not only enable us to generate more value-added revenue, but also expand our user base through this feature.
This paper is from Ulink Media, Shenzhen, China, the organizer of IOTE EXPO (IoT Expo in China)
