New York – Home-security startup Canary, which offers an all-in-one home-security system through its web store, expanded distribution today through online and brick-and-mortar retailers.
The crowd-funded company, which launched on Indiegogo in the summer of 2013, rolled out its $249 device today (March 25) through Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Verizon Wireless. An international rollout is planned later this year.
The system became available on the Verizon Wireless web site today and will be in Verizon’s brick-and-mortar stores on March 26. It’s available today in Best Buy’s brick-and-mortar stores and web store and though Home Depot’s web store. Home Depot will roll it out to brick-and-mortar stores in the coming months.
Separately, Canary announced that purchasers could qualify for a State Farm discount program offering an insurance discount up to 7 percent.
Canary’s device is a 6-inch tall, 3-inch-diameter cylinder that sits on a table or shelf and incorporates motion sensor, 147-degree wide-angle 1080p night-vision video camera, and sensors that monitor air temperature, humidity and air quality. Multiple Canary devices can be scattered throughout the house to monitor different areas.
The device sends alerts and HD video over the Internet to an Android or Apple smartphone. Canary devices connect to the Internet via a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection to a home’s broadband modem.
Notifications include recorded HD video of an event. Users get the option through Canary’s smartphone app to watch live video and listen in through the security system’s microphone. Through the app, users also scroll among multiple Canary video streams, sound the device’s built-in 90+dB siren, call the authorities or a neighbor, or hit the “everything is fine” button.
The device senses when a user leaves the house so it can arm itself.
To prevent false alarms, the Canary is said to detect the difference between pets and people and to recognize normal traffic patterns in a home over time. Canary help the system get smarter if users respond to the notifications it sends, the company noted. Because the company runs video analysis and computer vision algorithms in the Canary cloud, the machine’s learning features will continue to improve over time, Canary added.
The device comes with four service plans. The free plan offers remote access to video for the past 12 hours. The $9/month plan stores the past seven days of video and records whether the device is armed or disarmed. The service price for additional models is 50 percent less.
A $19 plan offers 30 days of cloud storage, and the $39 plan offers 90 days of cloud storage and adds call-center monitoring.
