Ecobee launches a smart video doorbell and new features for its ... - The Verge

Ecobee's newest video doorbell can show a live view of your front porch on your thermostat. But that's not the only clever synergy the smart home company has up its sleeve.

Smart thermostat manufacturer Ecobee's newest product is a video doorbell that streams to its thermostat.

Image: Ecobee

The Nest Learning Thermostat may have grabbed all the headlines when it launched in 2011 and kick-started the current home automation trend. Ex-Apple engineers! Entirely new design for a thermostat! It can program itself! But it wasn't the first smart thermostat. That accolade belongs to Ecobee, a small Canadian startup that launched the Ecobee Smart in 2008, three years before Nest came along.

Now, Ecobee is betting on expanding its ecosystem by launching a smart video doorbell, enhancing its affordable smart security system, and leaning further into smart home energy management. While it's definitely not the first in either category, it plans to be the smartest.

In the decade or so since the two companies launched overpowered thermostats that held so much promise for the smart home, they have gone down drastically different paths. Where Ecobee's original product has matured into a fine vintage, Google (which bought Nest in 2014) has let the excellent Nest Learning Thermostat wither on the vine, ostensibly replacing it with a watered-down version with half the smarts and none of the visual appeal. 

By contrast, Ecobee's latest flagship thermostat, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium, has a slew of new capabilities. In addition to being a very good smart thermostat that adapts your heating and cooling based on whether you're home or away and even which room you are in, it is also a smart speaker (Alexa or Siri), an indoor air quality monitor, a smoke and CO alarm listener, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a radar-powered motion sensor. While Nest was the first to add radar-powered motion sensing to its thermostat, the other notable recent hardware upgrade was… a mirrored face.

The Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera is a wired video doorbell that costs $159.99.

Image: Ecobee

The new Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera, launching today for $159.99, has a headline-worthy trick of displaying a live feed from the camera onto your thermostat (not just the top-of-the-line model, it's coming to the Ecobee Enhanced and Ecobee with Voice Control models next year). This is something I always thought Nest might do. Instead, they have stand-alone smart displays for viewing your doorbell feed, but those haven't been refreshed in a while.

Ecobee also announced today that all its thermostats going back to the Ecobee 3 will act as a keypad for Ecobee's smart home security system before the end of the year, and those with speakers can also be a siren. Nest's security system has been discontinued, and its doorbells don't talk to its thermostats.

The latest Ecobee product rounds out what is fast becoming an impressive smart home ecosystem. Ecobee also has an innovative indoor camera, the $99 SmartCamera with Voice Control (Alexa), and its smart security system leverages Ecobee's Smart Sensors for Doors & Windows. These two-in-one sensors monitor motion and contact, as Nest's now-discontinued Detect sensors did. The sensors also work with the thermostat to shut off the HVAC if a door or window is left open, something Nest's never did.

Additionally, where many smart home companies are proprietary, Ecobee is largely open, working with every major smart home platform. It has also committed to supporting the new universal smart home standard Matter on its thermostats (Google is one of the founders of Matter). "We see Matter as a great addition to our thermostats; we're committed to open ecosystems and ecosystems that matter to our customers. We haven't made any announcements [about timing], but you'll see some relatively soon," CEO Stuart Lombard told me in an interview ahead of the launch of the doorbell. However, some companies who were bullish on Matter backed away when the technology or business models became too difficult to figure out and others have promised compatibility but are yet to deliver. Where Ecobee will land remains to be seen.

Will slow and steady win the race?

While Ecobee is late to the doorbell game (Ring arrived in 2014, and Nest announced its Hello in 2017), Ecobee's Smart Doorbell Camera has some compelling features, including combination radar and computer vision-powered alerts that were impressively accurate in my testing, a towering field of view that captured my porch from top to bottom, the ability to be a hub for its smart security system, and the option to turn a thermostat into a video intercom. 

You can read my full review here, but here are some high-level specs for the new video doorbell, which is available now for $159.99 on ecobee.com, and online at Amazon, Best Buy, and Lowe's: 

• A wired video doorbell with 1080p HD video and 5MP sensor
• 8x video zoom, color, and infrared night vision 
• IP65 rated, -13 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit, with no built-in battery for improved weather resiliency
• A 3:4 aspect ratio, with a 175-degree vertical field of view and 187 on the diagonal (substantially more than Nest's 145 degrees diagonal)
• Works with Apple Home (not HomeKit Secure Video) and Amazon Alexa at launch (support for Google Home promised)
• Monthly subscription of $5 (or $50 a year) per camera for cloud-stored, motion-activated recordings (2 minutes long, no 24/7 recording)
• Ecobee Smart Security Complete plan adds professional monitoring and unlimited cameras for $10 a month ($90 a year) when paired with Smart Sensors for Doors & Windows
• Free person-detection alerts; subscription required for package notifications.

Ecobee's smart thermostats can now act as keypads to disarm its security system.

Image: Ecobee

The big question, however, is why a doorbell and why now? The main selling point for Ecobee's smart thermostat has been its wireless temperature and motion sensors, the latter of which is the base for most security systems. When the company added door and window sensors with motion sensing built-in for its security system, it found a natural connection between energy saving and security: turning off the heating or cooling when a door or window is open. A natural extension to a security system is the convenience of a keypad for disarming a system and an outdoor camera, both of which Ecobee has now added.

Today, the Ecobee thermostat itself is one step away from being a smart home hub, an easy step if the company follows through on its promise to support Matter. "It has multiple radios — Bluetooth, 915 MHz radio, Wi-Fi. It's already a device with bridging capabilities between networks," says Lombard.

Hardware-wise, it's also a 24/7, connected programmable touchscreen on your wall, with built-in machine learning capabilities. "The processor is a quad-core 1.5 Gigahertz CPU with 500 MB of RAM and two gigs of flash memory. It's got a lot of headroom," says Greg Fyke, chief product officer at Ecobee. "As does the new doorbell. We've designed it with a set of sensors, actuators, and machine learning capabilities so that, as we learn, we can incorporate new capabilities and features."

Ecobee's ecosystem now includes a smart doorbell camera, smart indoor camera, smart thermostats, smart temperature sensors, and smart security sensors.

Image: Ecobee

Context is king in the smart home, and Ecobee plans to deliver