Google's Nest launches new security camera

Editor's note: This is a republication of a story that ran in June 2015.

NEW YORK — It's been about a year since Google-owned Nest Labs paid around $550 million for Dropcam, a maker of home security cameras. Now it seems the company is turning to Dropcam for inspiration.

Nest has unveiled a new $199 home monitoring camera called Nest Cam, along with a cloud-based subscription service that will let you save 10 days of continuous video footage captured from the device.

The cloud service, called Nest Aware, costs $10 a month. You can add a second camera to the subscription for $5 a month. You can also pay $30 a month to store 30 days of continuous video off one camera.

Nest Cam will be sold through Nest.com, BestBuy, Amazon, Google Play and Target, among other places. The new camera will replace Dropcam in the Nest product portfolio.

It captures 1080p high-definition video and includes an 8X digital zoom, microphone and speaker. It also leverages eight infrared LEDs to capture scenes at night.

Nest says it will be easy to find an actual incident that may have been captured on camera since you'll receive a notification alert on your phone and such episodes are filtered by sound and motion.

Nest Cam will apparently also get chummy with any other Nest devices in your home. If you have the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector,a triggered alarm will turn on Nest Cam if it is not already going. If you set the Nest Learning Thermostat to Away mode the Nest Cam can also automatically turn itself on.

It's about the "home taking care of itself and taking care of you.You don't have to program your home. It should know what to do," says Maxime Veron, head of hardware product marketing at Nest.

The original Nest product, the Learning Thermostat, made thermostats sexy and helped kick off interest in all sorts of connected household objects — so-called Internet of Things things. It's one of the reasons Google spent some $3 billion to acquire Nest in early 2014.

At its recent I/O developer conference, Google talked up Brillo and Weave to connect household appliances, and Veron says Nest products already take advantage of the Weave standard. Rival Apple, of course, has similar designs on the home through its HomeKit developer software.

As part of the announcements, Nest also unveiled a new version of Protect that can detect both slow and fast burning fires. And should Protect indeed sniff out smoke, the Nest Learning Thermostat can shut down your household heating system automatically. The new Protect can also be silenced from your smartphone via Bluetooth.

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