> Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees.
A couple other reasons:
* They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions.
* They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors.
Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).
A couple other reasons:
* They want to sell the same product at different prices in different regions.
* They're concerned about copycat hardware vendors.
Hikvision (and I think Dahua) seems to want to prevent people from modifying their firmware; as far as I can tell it's for these reasons. I really wish they would just open it up. I'd love to put open source firmware on a decent outdoor IP camera. The vendors' own firmware is pretty lacking. It's untrustworthy (proprietary software from a Chinese company; how sure are you it doesn't have backdoors?), written insecurely (probably out of negligence rather than intent but again who knows), buggy in general, has mediocre motion detection (not sure I could do better on their hardware but I'd love to try), and has mediocre H.264 encoding (likewise).