Google’s Nest adds a $199 Nest Cam security camera to its connected home product line

Google’s Nest Labs announced a new security camera to add to its growing list of home automation products: the $199 Nest Cam.

Nest Cam looks for motion and sends an alert to a phone app if it sees something unusual. Nest said the camera has full 1080P HD video. It also sports 8 built-in LEDs, which gives it a better view of the room, even at night. Nest said the camera has a 130-degree field of view, and can detect objects up to 20 feet away.

The camera has a built-in microphone and speaker, so not only is the device always listening (and reporting sounds to the app), but you can use it to tell the dog to get the hell off the couch.

The microphone can ignore background noise, Nest said, like the sound of traffic, but will send an alert if it hears something potentially dangerous like a boom, a crash, or a strange voice.

In the Nest app’s home screen you can see what each camera is seeing in the home. You can click on any one of them for a larger view.

The Nest app got a redesign to accommodate the new camera and to better display thermometer and smoke detector information. The app runs on iOS 8 or Android 4.0 mobile devices.

Nest Cam collects a video history and stores it in the cloud. The Nest Aware cloud storage service will store 30 days of footage for $30 per month for the first camera and $15 per month for each additional camera. It will store 10 days of video for $10 a month for a first camera, and $5 per month for additional cameras.

A Nest representative said that uploading video streams to the cloud requires roughly a half a megabit per second of bandwidth. The average available bandwidth in the home is around 11 megabits per second, the person said. So if several cameras are streaming constantly to the cloud, it can take a significant bite out of the total bandwidth availability in the home at any one time.

The alternative to streaming is simply checking in on the various cameras around the home using the app.

The camera is powered by a 10-foot USB cable that plugs into a wall outlet. It has a magnetized metal base so that it can stand upright or be mounted to a wall.

The new camera will be available next week for $199. It will be available from Best Buy, among other retailers.

An FCC filing tipped Nest’s hand earlier this month. The company’s testing lab in Taiwan submitted its test report on a Nest “wireless camera” to the FCC for approval in early March. The documents became public record in late May.

Google acquired Nest in early 2014. Shortly after that, Nest acquired the security cam maker Dropcam.