Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

They're not architecturally delivering the video a different way if you pay than if you don't. They're just changing the retention period.

This video was probably recovered from cache somewhere.

There was an article the other day called something like "How is Google helping the investigation?"

It said she didn't have a cloud subscription, but that there are data pipelines that make these sort of devices work. (Imagine there's a thumbnail of the video in the product somewhere, so there's a pipeline that takes a video stream and generates thumbnails.)

According to the article, it was a matter of having someone figure out which pipelines her videos might have touched, and then go looking to see if there were any ephemeral artifacts that hadn't been lost yet.

> Most of these cloud connected cameras always stream footage through their cloud service, regardless of whether you pay for a subscription. Because people don't know how to configure port forwarding, etc, in their firewall.

No consumer product should have users do port-forwarding or punch holes in the firewall. You don't want an IoT device on your network accepting packets from the internet.

The proper way to do this is with a cloud server arbitrating connections, which is what a lot of products do.

The reason most consumers want cloud storage isn't for ease of access, though. It's because they want the footage stored securely somewhere. If the thief can just pick up your camera and walk away with the evidence, it's not very useful to you.

Some (ironically the cheap Chinese ones) use UDP hole punching for a P2P connection. Assumedly because it saves server costs.