Amazon is refreshing its subscription plans for its Ring video doorbells and cameras.

Ring Home Premium will include such as 24/7 recording and AI-powered video search, starting at $19.99 per month when it launches on November 5 in the U.S. Less-expensive tiers, Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Basic, will package in a few capabilities but not 24/7 recording or the enhanced search.

Ring is revamping its subscription service after the Amazon subsidiary was soaring under new CEO Liz Hamren, a former Microsoft executive. As it turned out, Ring has been established now as the second-largest seller of security systems in the United States, the research firm Parks Associates wrote. In May, after Bloomberg said so, the company just reached profitability six years after being acquired by Amazon for $1 billion.
Ring's new subscription plans
The basic Ring Protect plan will be replaced with Ring Home Basic for $4.99 per month. Ring Protect Plus will become Ring Home Standard for $9.99 monthly. Ring Protect Pro will become either Ring Home Standard with alarm professional monitoring at $19.99 per month, or Ring Home Premium, based on how many of the company's customers take each.

All Ring Home subscribers get person and package alerts, video preview alerts (brief GIF previews of camera motion alerts), and 180 days of video event history. Ring Home Standard customers can view video streams up to 30 minutes via "extended live view." And both Ring Home Standard and Ring Home Premium subscribers get "doorbell calls" — alerts that look like a call on your phone when a visitor rings the doorbell.

While some Ring owners are seeing mixed bag change

Ring Protect Pro subscribers will be losing local video storage, internet backup and Amazon's Eero Secure suite starting November 5. Without a Ring Alarm or Ring Alarm Pro device, they'll also lose SOS emergency response, which is part of alarm professional monitoring, too.

All of this, and many other features, including several monitoring capabilities from the Amazon household robot, Astro, are now locked behind Ring Home Premium.

For new customers who have a Ring Alarm or Ring Alarm Pro, Amazon will also start charging a $10-per-month fee for professional monitoring for the above-listed alarm, starting after November 5. (Ring Home Premium doesn't, but it does include SOS emergency response.) Customers subscribing to Virtual Security Guard as part of Ring Protect Pro-the company's corporate security plan for $99 a month, which includes call center monitoring-will get it for free as will Ring Protect Plus subscribers who add on the Virtual Security Guard add-on.

Customers who enrolled Ring Alarm and Alarm Pro customers who enrolled in Ring Protect Plus prior to or during 2021 will automatically move to Ring Home Standard with alarm professional monitoring sometime March 1, 2025. That will mean paying essentially double for their subscription - from the $10 monthly fee Ring Protect Plus had - but Amazon says folks can cancel the alarm professional monitoring add-on before the shift occurs.

To soften the blow, Amazon is bundling one year of Ring Home Premium with alarm professional monitoring free for Ring Protect Pro subscribers. If subscribers want to continue to have alarm professional monitoring when that expires, they'll have to pay full price-a minimum of $10 a month plus $19.99 a month for Ring Home Premium.

AI-powered search
One of the marquee features in Ring Home Premium, Smart Video Search, could help consumers locate specific moments in their recorded video footage, Amazon claims. The technology is debuting Wednesday as a public beta for some ring customers. Smart Video Search lets you type queries into the Ring app to pin-point notable moments.

For instance, "raccoon in the backyard last night" might help you understand why the trash cans were knocked over, said Eric Kuhn, Amazon GM of Ring experiences, in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. Searching for "red bicycle in the driveway" might yield cute videos of your oldest child teaching your youngest how to ride a bike.

Initial search capabilities would include animals, locations, packages, people, time, vehicles, weather and jumping, running, playing or riding. In response to critics, Amazon said it's taken safeguards against objectionable or otherwise potentially harmful searches and will refine the search feature over time.

Amazon wasn't saying what-if-anything it's done to reduce the impact of such biases on the AI models driving Smart Video Search.

In August, MIT published a study which determined that the commercial models, among them OpenAI's GPT-4 were likely to tell viewers that they needed to call the police when shown Ring videos captured in minority communities. The same study found that the models analyzed less scenes for terms such as "casing the property" or "burglary tools" than when analyzing footage from majority-white neighborhoods.

"Ring is a leader in delivering privacy features for customers, and we're also committed to developing responsible AI," Kuhn wrote. "We have a long history of listening to and learning from our customers."

The Smart Video Search rollout predates the AI updates Google promised for its Nest cameras and doorbells, which include richer captions on camera footage and similar natural-language search functionality.