It's 2.50 an hour because Google has margins. A nation state could do it at cost, and even if it's not a huge difference, the price of a year's worth of embeddings is just $21,900. That's a rounding error, especially considering it's a one time cost for footage.

Right? $2.50 an hour is trivial to a Government that can vote to invent a trillion dollars. Even just 1 million dollars is the cost of monitoring 45 real time feeds for a year. I'm sure just many very rich people would pay that for the safety of their compound.