Netgear’s Arlo Smart Home Security Cameras are now available in Australia

Netgear today launched its Arlo Smart Home Security Camera in Australia. First announced at CES 2015, the Arlo Smart Home Security is a completely wire-free, internet security camera – the first of its kind. Powered by four C123 batteries, Netgear estimates that the Arlo Home Security Camera will run for four to six months.

In order to conserve battery life, Arlo cameras operate in a low power mode until they detect motion, or are remotely viewing using the compatible smartphone app. The cameras are waterproof and weatherproof, can record in day and night and can be used outdoors and indoors.

Arlo's high-definition recordings are pushed to a cloud storage solution, which out of the box includes 1GB of space and supports up to five cameras.

Making a truly wireless product is very difficult according to Patrick Collins, Netgear's Vice President of Smart Home Products, and getting as much life as possible out of each battery required a lot of hardware and software optimisation.

"You have a lot of decisions on what to include, and what you don't want to include," said Collins. "Managing power consumption is the number one thing, if you just take a regular camera, pull out the power, put in batteries and start streaming, it will last maybe five minutes."

The compromises made in order to realise the vision of a truly wire-free product were informed by consumer research. Netgear's research found that high definition video, night vision, motion-detection alerts, indoor and outdoor usage and smartphone capabilities were among customer's more requested features.