 I'm here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about Unify Protect here in May of 2021. Is this still a good system to use? What are some of the pros and cons? We're going to dive into that, but first, if you'd like to learn more about me or my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right on the top. If you'd like to help out this channel on other ways, there's some affiliate links down below and just other ways to contact and connect with us, and we're engaged with us on our forums. All that fun stuff, link down below or head over to our website, LawrenceSystems.com. But Unify Protect, let's talk about this. Now, quick history. Unify Video was the original product, and we started getting into a lot of the cameras and everything else, and then that product, unfortunately, was discontinued. And that left a, you know, sour taste to a lot of people, including myself. But Unify seems to have done a good job on the Protect system and offered a migration path for all those camera was we installed. Now, at first, that migration path was a little rocky, because the only thing that had originally came with Protect were the Unify cloud keys, which by the way, they run Protect, but not much Protect, because you can't hook too many cameras up to these are not very powerful or neat, they're exist. But in terms of the overall use case, yeah, they're not that great. But then they released the Unify NVR. And that turned out to be a solid product. I was very skeptical. I have a review I'll link to on that product. But it's actually turned out to be, well, a solid performer with that's actually reliable and easy to update and just works. So let's dive into the pros and cons. And before we go too far, let's first talk about what does all this stuff cost and where do you buy it from? I think we need to start there. Because a lot has changed the way Unify sells things. A lot of this was sold on Amazon previously. And for the most part, yeah, they've removed it all from Amazon. And there's two places you can get Unify from large resellers. So when we're buying a large quantity of Unify equipment, there are specific channel partner resellers we've worked with to get some of the deals on things. But don't call us for these things that are out of stock right here in May of 2021, we're aware they're out of stock, our vendors can't get any more of them either. So mostly what Unify and for most end users are more small deployments, you'll want to buy these direct from Unify if you want the good warranty. There was a lot of gray label stuff, I guess you could say gray market being sold and it caused a lot of confusion on the Amazon store. That's my understanding of why they got rid of it. I don't know Unify has never directly said it, but I know there was always confusion on warranty on where the stuff had come from, whether it was refurbished or whatnot. So I believe that's why they went to a pretty much a direct sales model. So you buy everything from Unify direct. One good thing about the Unify protect system though is it does not have any subscription. So you don't have to worry about when you buy it, then going up and then signing up and paying recurring fees. This is one of the first things that kind of sets them apart from a lot of the other consumer products. And I would still compare these to more of the consumer market, you know, like a ring doorbell versus a unified doorbell or any of the other competitors out there that make similar doorbells to ring. Most of these companies all focus on the subscription service. They don't really care about selling you any type of equipment other than to get you to subscribe to their ever increasing costs on what these things cost per month to add for each camera you add and things like that. They want to sell subscriptions. Unify's goal is to sell hardware. So when you buy the Unify NVR, you can then use the Unify cameras, but that is kind of a vendor lock and ecosystem. So you kind of have to commit to it. If you have a couple other non Unify cameras, you like to tie them to the Unify NVR. I'm sorry, they will not work. There's probably someone who will point out there's some hacky project to try to get them to work. I've seen things like this. I don't recommend it. I mean, I recommend playing with things all the time, but it's not something I would try to support commercially or guarantee to work. It's just a fun hobby project at that point. But if you buy the Unify cameras, all the Unify cameras that are sold on their site are completely compatible with their Unify NVR without any subscription. And these cameras also don't work nice with other NVRs. They're not supporting any open standards that are in RTSP, which is not the best way to stream data off. So I don't recommend buying just these cameras and plugging them to another NVR. Matter of fact, the cameras, someone may say are kind of pricey. Yes. But then when you tie in licensing fees that some of the other NVR platforms have, they become a little bit more reasonable. The price on these, in my opinion, has the license fee built in, I guess you could say, but at least the licenses are perpetual. If you want to look at it that way, as in you buy it once and they work without having to go buy, you know, another license or worry about a license expiring, that especially when you get into the commercial market is a challenge. Now, the lineup of cameras they have is pretty nice, other than the problems that I don't know if it's a direct Unify, can't manufacture these fast enough, demand problem or the chip shortage that we're facing here in 2021, Unify not being the most forthcoming company about what's going on. We just know that these have been out of stock, especially this really cool. I love this Unify Protect G3 Instant Camera. We've been playing with it for months. I haven't really reviewed it because I didn't want to get people excited about a product that is really hard to get your hands on. I will say I like it. Of course, it works as expected, but having a $29 full HD Wi-Fi camera, perfect, except getting one is really, really challenging. So a few of these are still out of stock right now. You may be watching this future and going, what out of stock problem? Anyways, hopefully that's true and these are easy to get because setting a few of these up around your house means you can get a really nice budget system. Now, what do you record on the Unify Protect Network video recorder? I've reviewed this device before it supports up to 50 cameras and yeah, they're reliable. We've actually deployed quite a few of these as a replacement for the defunct now Unify video platform. And of every client we've put their system in as a replacement has been really happy. We haven't had any update issues. We haven't any, these go bad. We've actually had zero that we've had to return. I'm not saying that's an absolute guarantee that there's never been a failure out there. I'm just saying all the units we've bought, which has been quite a few of them, we have not had any problems with it. We've also consulted on a lot of projects where we've helped people install these. It's in the hundreds, not thousands that we've installed. So that's, you know, a small slice of the overall market, but at least I can tell you that so far experience has actually been quite good with these. Now, the Unify Cloud Key is still an option. If someone has said I have like a camera and a doorbell, but it's not something I really ever push people to because right away, as soon as you get one camera, you go, I'd like three more or another one over here. And this is where the Unify Cloud Key just falls short. It to me is just not a powerful enough system to really handle it. If you have a situation where you only want one doorbell installed, it probably will work fine. I don't know how well it would work though. If you wanted to put a doorbell and 10 cameras, it may claim to support a few cameras, but yeah, our experience with it has been less than great when it comes to that. Same thing with the Unify Dream Machine. It seems to handle the Unify Video OK. It's an option, but the Unify Dream Machine Pro only has single hard drives, so there's no resiliency. And same thing with the Cloud Key, single hard drive, no resiliency if there's any problems. So our go-to is the Unify Protect Recorder. Now at $2.99 to the recorder, I don't think that's unreasonable. The web interface you get and everything works really well. The application works well. And actually, let's just go right over and take a look at the Unify Protect system. I actually started the dashboard. And since I reviewed this originally, I've actually been impressed with the updates because, well, it has more features, especially the new dashboard with smart detect. Here is my son walking out of the building because we've got smart detect and it detects people. It didn't inspect vehicles. I'm hoping in the future, they're going to have a lot more options they have, but you can see it puts a little blue box tracking and walk by. And then for him, he's in the studio here where I set these cameras up. These cameras are actively connected to my system. So now it'll show, yes, now you're looking at how I see things. There's me walking by and there's my son walking by. And that's actually the camera that you're looking at in the TV that's behind it. Pretty slick. And then the vehicle detection. These are vehicles that have come by or went by and it grabs and can see these vehicles as they go around the back where I have the smart detection turned on. And actually, we'll make this bigger so you can kind of see it. This is the camera at the back of the office and it detected the vehicle right there. These can also be set in summary. This is just a neat feature because you go down here and go smart detections and it says person, vehicle, person, vehicle. Like I said, I hope and they add more in the future. But this allows you instead of just saying a motion notification to do a specific notification and to go a step further. They've also created a granular system to choose which camera and whether you want an email or a push notification for the app, whether you want to be a smart notification or a motion notification. And of course, these are the camera disconnect options. They've really done a good job of putting this together so you can say, all right, I want to know when my office is closed, for example, when someone walks by the rear door, because they probably shouldn't be there when the office is closed. So you can set those type of notifications to be sent to your phone. And once again, this is that granular thing that they've really added that makes it really nice. There are systems that offer features like this, the higher end NBR systems, but now you start talking about the price going up or they're often one of the ones that charge a subscription service to be able to have features like that. This is where I kind of really for the small businesses that we put these in the small offices and things like that, it's really nice. Now they've also done gradient or user permission so you can create different users and then kind of say, all right, they can only view maybe a couple of the inside cameras or maybe only the outside cameras. So once again, they give you some level of control over that. And finally, from an install standpoint, when you set these up, I don't need to know anything about their firewall, it does connect to the unified cloud server. The app connects to the unified cloud server. It does have a local option. I can still log into this locally if I want, but the ability to connect it to their cloud server, not map any ports, not have to open up the firewall. It automatically goes to the unified UI site. No weird certificate to click through no plugins to load. If you remember any of the older, you know, especially the less expensive NBR is always required in an Explorer and some plugin, or I've even seen some that used variations on active X objects and flash and weird things like that that just aren't really compatible with modern computer systems. Unify is all just standard web based system. And then the app that works on both iOS and on Android works really well, whether they're inside the office or not, the system is smart enough to realize when they're connecting locally versus when they're connecting remotely. Now from the technician standpoint, our standpoint from setting these up for clients, all you need to do to adopt a camera is put them all on the same network. So we'll build out a camera network for a client, put all the devices on that same network, we adopt them in that lower labor means there's a lower cost for us to install these any client's office. So ease of use because you want something that your clients can use without having to call you. You have to think about this when you're putting these in for businesses. You know, if I want this little four person outfit, maybe a small insurance company, we installed one of these four, we don't really want them to be trying to figure out a complicated system just to view if someone walked in the door. We've installed these larger installs for a couple of trucking companies. They're, you know, about 15, 20 cameras, no problem for them. Pizza places. Yeah, they love them because once again, it's really simple for them to look. You know, when did someone come in the lobby door? When did someone stop by the front of the office? And when is someone hanging out then they shouldn't be behind the building? This is actually a direct use case we've had for a couple of them where that was one of the challenges and they actually found it really intuitive and easy to use. And they're not necessarily not picking on them is just not what they do. They're not very tech savvy. So having a simplistic system that doesn't require a lot of support worked out really well. And for us to go out and install them without having to do anything more than just throw a bunch of cameras on the same network worked out really well. So my overall feelings on unified protect is it's a solid system. The enhancements they've had over the years have done well. The especially features like and I'll leave links to the other videos because I've done reviews of these. Like when you look at the devices, it's labeled magic video tube. It's called the viewport. And you can see it behind me. That's how we're able to change the camera views. And it changes almost instantly. So if I need to go in here, swap it to a different set of cameras, set motion options, set what it shows on there, and you can have multiple of these on a single NVR. This has been one of those extra things from an installer standpoint. They're just plugging in network adapters. The unified viewport works over the network. We can control it remotely. So if they say, Hey, can you change TV to we label it TV to we can remotely go in there and change it from a technician management standpoint, makes that really easy to use. We just go in here, choose which of the settings we want. And you're actually watching it in real time change right behind my head again. They've done a solid job of all these little features that make for a good overall system. Now last couple of things we'll look at in here is the time lapse. This is the one thing that I wish was a little bit faster. I specifically like here's a van going by. And if we try to play back and actually let's specifically go to the g4 pro here time lapse, one of the problems is, and this is all the g4 pro, it's seeking reasonably fast when I do it this way. But let's try and play something back at a higher speed. It's going to start struggling a little bit. I was really wishing they give us a faster nvr. It's still completely usable. I can still completely download and export things out of there. But when there's a lot of videos in a row, the system does kind of chug a little bit. That's the one downside I guess you could say about these is it's not quite as fast as I think it should be. And I wish they had an option where instead of 299, maybe 599, I could buy a faster processor in these, especially if someone had a bunch of high res cameras. And like I said, it works. But yeah, you know, this still goes into use unify experience in there. Now a couple downside of these systems that some people may not like. Yes, it does require you to register with the unify cloud in order to get these things set up. That's just the way this system works. Second, limited choices in nvr. If someone needed a system specced out that was more than 50 cameras, the nvr not an option. This is the max it supports and are not stackable. So if we have 100 camera system, I would have to sell two nvrs and then log into two separate systems. Now you can tie the systems to one account to make that easier, but that's certainly not the same as a nice stackable system that would be able to display all 50 cameras. Also, when someone asks for a larger system like that, we're not talking unify nvr. So it kind of goes outside of the market that I believe they're trying to target. They are really focused on that. I would say the sweet spot for them is these small 10 camera jobs that we probably install the most of for this particular setup. So the limited nvr choice is also related to the next problem of how do we get the data backed up for longer if they have a really long retention policy? That's a pretty problem I wish they'd solve. When you do this with the unified protect system, they don't have any official ways. Someone will point out there may be unofficial ways, but there's no official way to offload all the videos for long term storage. You can only fit whatever drives are supported at this time in there. And I see at this time, look it up because they're always expanding what their hard drive support is. They do support the larger drives, but that's still not the same as actually backing it up. When we do some of the commercial systems, we'll sometimes have a NAS system on there. So as they have a retention policy to keep these for, let's say six months or even longer, maybe even a year. And that requires a lot of storage. It almost always means building a larger system to be able to handle it. You are stuck with the four drive limit with their NVR. And that's it with no offload option. Maybe in the future, it'd be awesome if Unify because they did stick a 10 gig port on this. So it's got 10 gig connectivity, but no way to offload all of that. Hopefully someone over at Unify will say, Hey, you know what we could do? Add that as an option. So if anyone over at Unify is watching, that'd be a cool thing. It's I think pretty frequently, certainly frequently requested. So anyways, my overall on this, I do like the system. We have used it as a replacement for all the clients that we've previously sold the Unify video to. And as that expired, we moved them over to the Unify Protect. We still recommend it to a lot of the, especially home users who are saying, I'm looking for a pretty basic system that doesn't have all these subscription fees, but you know, I can have all the video locally. It doesn't offer too much in a way right now of the smart detection other than vehicles or people. But then again, that's mostly what you're looking for. You don't always want to know other than motion detection, if there was a dog in your yard, but you may be curious when someone's standing around your building and it does do that well. And that is probably the most common detection use that we set up in terms of configuring alerts for people. But I have no affiliate links or anything. This is not sponsored by or at all associated with Unify. I made this on my own. So you can buy it direct from Unify. But if you need help with consulting, hit us up on our website. We do offer consulting services for setting these up and configuring them. But overall, you will find them pretty intuitive to use. All right. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of this video. If you enjoyed this content, please give it a thumbs up. 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