Cocoon Cam Plus Baby Breathing and Video Monitor 2018 Version - Discontinued by Manufacturer

It's been 5 days since it's arrived and 2 days since we have installed it. I have the Arlo camera that I used to montior the baby with but needed something that doesn't session out.Cacoon is a plastic built cam. Usable and mounts over the baby crib. The screw holes are small and only fit the screws in the box. The angles to screw it in a tricky if you use power tools. Try not using he sticky tape on the back for positioning if you love your walls.The link and setup was super easy. Took no more than 30s to link to the app after the account was setup. Sweet!Positioning is a pain. We have a larger crib so we had to positioning the camera a little above 3 ft which is the required height from the bed surface. The camera is wide angle and covers most of the bed except the bottom corners. I would have expected a longer camera support bar to center the camera to cover the entire bed but it's good coverage area almost 95%... Hoping my baby doesn't get stuck in the corner that I can't see. I have the Arlo for that ... The plastic fastener on the camera is good and holds the camera but being so close to the camera my hands always hit the camera when I tried to adjust it.Night 1: the baby is asleep. The white noise Is on. And we are tracking the baby on the camera... The sound the app makes like something alien. The white noise is 10 ft away from the baby but the cam picks up the noise and it's sounds bad on the cacoon. It's not bad on the other cams. Picture quality felt like a DVD gone bad. Pixelation on the video was very bad. The video stream seemed to have straighten out by morning. But this happens only at the start of the stream.Baby breathing feature works. It detects the tiniest of motions. The alerts I get on the phone only tell me that the baby has gone back to sleep. It never alerts me that he Has woken up. Lol. But it does track activity in it's feed to tell us how the baby slept which is good as we track hours of his sleep.Data is an aspect which is scary. I don't think the video is compressed and optimized to be sent back to the server... The data volumes are huge. My data uploads were off the roof on day 1. I do have a 150mbps connection with higher data limits but this is one aspect that you will need to monitor. Its either baby monitor or Netflix(but who has time for that with a baby)Cacoon connects to the server fast and to show me hd video even when I am not on WiFi and not at home. The speed is good and picture quality is good too. The picture quality is maintained even at home wifi but it skips frames. It's certainly not 60fps but I guess it does the job.I am really torn between features and infrastructure setup needed. It's not a 3 but it's certainly not a 2 either. The features are good and for us it offers sleep activity monitoring that we expect. I might update this if I get an email from ISP to contain my data usage.Hope this was helpful

*UPDATE just received this email. Please don't waste your money on this."Dear C,We regret to inform you that in light of current circumstances, we will no longer be able to support the Cocoon Cam app after May 31st, 2020. We are a small company and are compelled to make this decision as we move in a different direction with the business.Fortunately, you will still be able to stream video using your Cocoon Cam camera if you download the camera manufacturer's app.Instructions can be found here:cocooncam com pages helpWe advise doing this sooner than later so that you don’t experience any lapse in your video streaming abilities.We have been honored to serve you, our customers, these past several years. If you have any questions or concerns we will be available via email at [email protected] until the end of May.Sincerely,CEO of Cocoon Cam and Team"2018First off, I want to say, I can't say enough good things about the tech support at Cocoon Cam. Those running the company DO listen! The app has undergone some very useful changes since we started using the camera and as far as user experience goes I would definitely recommend the camera.I was looking for deals on cameras and got a deal on this in November 2018. I set it up and left it in the box until our first baby was born in May 2019 and we started using it nightly. It was using so much data at first and we would plug it in and unplug it between naps and nighttime which helped a lot but was a pain. We eventually bought a wifi outlet and could just tell google or alexa to turn off that outlet when we didn't want to use the camera which was HUGE. So easy. I still think the app should have some way to do this internally (though they did recently add a 'low bandwidth' mode which is very helpful). I don't need the camera to be on and streaming while the baby isn't in the bassinet or crib. We had a few software issues, sometimes the camera would detect motion even though the crib was empty which is very strange. Sometimes the app will randomly crash on our samsung tablet and sometimes it would go black. We've largely determined that it must be something to do with the tablet since it works fine on our phones. Tech Support has been extremely responsive and very helpful, I just wish I could text them back pictures instead of email because their texting support is very very quick to respond.Cut to the last few days. The camera was 'on' but not sending a signal. The wifi wouldn't work. Plugged it into an ethernet port on our router. The back lit up like it was connected but still no live feed. Contacted tech support. Spent 30 min trying to get it to work, they passed it up the chain, today spent another 30ish minutes trying to get it to work and they offered to send a new one even though it was 'outside the 1 year hardware warranty'. Now I know technically it has been more than a year since I purchased the camera. I'm very glad that they offered to send a new one, as that is what I would expect with a defective product that has not even been in use for a full year yet. If I had done something to break it or if it was 5 years old and I was just trying to get a free upgrade, then I get that, but it has just been sitting in the babies room untouched. I was pretty bothered with the response and I'm sure they can tell that the camera has less than 10 months of actual use, not only that but 8-10 hours a day the camera isn't even on! I would hope the company changes their policy, because as a consumer buying a baby monitor my expectation is that the camera should at the very least last 2 years. 10 months is a bit of a red flag to me. I haven't seen any other reviews so it's possible and likely that I just happened upon a lemon. Personally I think the software and app and everything works pretty well. I haven't seen anything noticeably better for a similar price and I applaud the company for their support. Just from my personal experience I don't think that warranty is nearly long enough.TL;DRCompany has great tech support, like seriously I cannot say enough good things about the responsiveness, easy of use and quality. Good camera and great features. However the camera died in less than a year of use and because I purchased it before our baby came it was technically outside warranty. They did offer a replacement, which I am very grateful for but I would hope a camera would have a warranty long enough to actually last for as long 1 baby would need a monitor (about 2-3 years).