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On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the "off" switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.
It's not unusual for a manufacturer to call time on physical hardware. [...]
But this is a little different, because Belkin isn't merely ending support. It also plans to decommission the cloud services required for its Wemo NetCam devices to actually work.
"Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network, without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications," Belkin said on its official website.
"If you use your Wemo NetCam as a motion sensor for your Wemo line of products, it will no longer provide this functionality and will be removed as an option from your Wemo app," the company added.
Adding insult to injury, the ubiquitous consumer network gear maker only plans to refund customers with active warranties, which excludes anyone who bought their device more than two years ago. The window to submit requests is open from now until 30 June.
Customers will also have to provide the company with the original receipt, showing how much they paid for the unit. Though it shouldn't be too hard to fish out an Amazon invoice from an inbox, if you bought the unit from a bricks-and-mortar retailer, there's a chance you won't have that information to provide.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:27PM
Based on their support page, it looks like they were charging about $10 a month for their "premium" service. I guess that wasn't enough money for Belkin, even though the service stores videos for just 14 days, so there's no ballooning storage costs.
What I suspect really happened is that this iSecurity+ service was expecting a certain percentage of camera buyers would sign up for the premium service which would cover the bandwidth costs for their free customers. That probably didn't work out for Belkin since their customers are almost always the penny pinching types that only buy the cheapest item on the shelf. So, when the people that run the iSecurity+ service found they were losing money on the Belkin products, they terminated the contract with Belkin when it expired. I notice that there are no Belkin products on their current list of cameras that they support.