Unlocking the Potential: Camera Support in Matter 1.5 Enhances Your Smart Home Experience

It’s finally happening. Three years after Matter launched, the interoperability standard now includes the most popular smart home devices: cameras.

The Matter 1.5 spec, announced today, adds support for all types of video cameras — from indoor and outdoor, wired and battery-powered cameras, to video doorbells, baby monitors, pet cams, and more. Matter support should be possible with an OTA update, so some of your existing cameras could become Matter-compatible. The new spec also adds garage door controllers, soil sensors, bi-directional charging for EVs, and more advanced integration with utilities for energy management.

So far, cameras have been among the least interoperable devices in our homes, and bringing them into Matter is a big win for the standard. With Matter, you should be able to add any certified camera to your smart home platform of choice, such as Apple Home, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Home, and access it there alongside cameras from different manufacturers.

“Cameras might create even more momentum [for Matter]. Cameras might leapfrog everything.”

Cameras will use Matter-over-WiFi (or ethernet), which, as a local protocol, should improve reliability and latency, especially for things like streaming footage to your smart display and using camera events, such as motion, to trigger other devices and smart home automations.

However, all of these benefits will ultimately depend on how each platform and manufacturer decides to implement support — specifically, whether they decide to support cameras in Matter at all.

What capabilities will cameras have in Matter?

According to the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the organization behind Matter, Matter-certified home security cameras will support live video and audio streaming, two-way talk, and local and remote access. The standard also allows for pan-tilt-zoom controls for the cameras and the setting of detection and privacy zones.

Along with streaming, Matter 1.5 enables continuous and event-based recording, with the option to store recordings locally or in the cloud. But it doesn’t cover the storage of that footage. Instead, Matter hands off to whatever local or cloud storage options are available from the device makers and platforms.

“It should be possible for most modern cameras on the market today, and in people’s homes, to be updated to support Matter.”

This means a camera company could support Matter, but still require a cloud subscription in order for you to review recorded footage, Chris LaPré, head of strategy at the CSA, told The Verge in an interview. Additionally, while Matter support will likely be an add-on to a camera manufacturer’s connectivity options at first, the local storage route presents the possibility that someone could develop a network video recording (NVR) system that records everything locally, works with every smart home platform (that supports cameras in Matter), and never touches the cloud.

With Matter, all footage will be encrypted in transit, with end-to-end data encryption available “if the ecosystem wants to use it,” says LaPré. The standard supports streaming using the popular WebRTC protocol and access via STUN and TURN. It will also support TCP transport.

This covers all the different streaming technologies camera companies use, he says, which is one of the reasons it took a while to bring cameras into the spec. “We didn’t want to piecemeal this,” says LaPré. “We wanted to launch with a full-scoped spec.” (If you want to dig into the nitty-gritty, check out the Matter camera Device Type GitHub page.)

Matter doesn’t specify or limit the resolution of camera footage, nor does it dictate or manage features such as AI-powered detection types (person, package, etc.). These will be part of how camera manufacturers and platforms can differentiate their offerings — through adding things like AI-powered descriptive alerts (which Ring, Arlo, Wyze, and Google Nest offer).

The CSA says the standard is backward compatible. “It should be possible for most modern cameras on the market today, and in people’s homes, to be updated to support Matter,” LaPré says. However, which models will get the update is entirely up to each manufacturer.

When will Apple, Google, and Amazon support Matter cameras?

Based on previous rollouts, it takes at least a year from the release of a specification to achieve market penetration of devices. It’s been three years since Matter 1.0 was released, and we have plenty of lightbulbs, smart plugs, and locks. But other device types have taken longer.