re: just another smart home vendor alienating their users

Their business model probably assumed higher sales than they’ve had to cover their costs. The choice could be either get more money per customer or shut down completely and brick every device they’ve sold. That’s one of the risks of all of these gadgets that rely on someone else’s cloud.

PlayOn has a cloud version of their DVR where people get charged per episode for AWS cloud storage. Maybe the answer to the threat of all of these cloud services going away is to make customers use their own cloud. Maybe we eventually all have our own AWS accounts that these devices install into.