Wi-fi video monitoring and cloud recording company Dropcam showcased their use of AWS during the keynote of this year’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.  Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy explained that the idea for the company started with his father’s attempt to capture video footage of a dog on his lawn. The company aims to help its customers find out what goes on at home when they are not there.

Duffy’s father, an engineer, failed repeatedly in his attempts to catch the dog on camera, and that inspired the wi-fi monitoring camera and cloud storage service that Dropcam currently offers. Duffy said the one thing he did not anticipate was the fast pace at which the company’s grown. There is “more video footage uploaded per minute to Dropcam than YouTube by orders of magnitude,” he explained.

In order to capture and store this massive amount of data, Dropcam moved to AWS. The setup that makes the company work starts with the surveillance cameras, each capturing 1 Gb per second of raw data, which is compressed at 200 Kb er second, a 1000x compression. The video footage it then sent to Nexus which runs on EC2. Nexus “instantly mirrors the video to your viewing device,” it also takes the video data and stores it on a custom storage built with DynamoDB and S3. There is also a web platform on top of AWS.

Dropcam doesn’t collect video data only. They also capture lots of meta data from cameras, such as wi-fi signal strength. There are “300 million data points added every day,” Duffy said. “We can actually A/B test wi-fi drivers,” helping deliver “better wi-fi performance in your home.”

Dropcam has also recently launched a new feature, currently in beta,  Activity Recognition, which “tries to automatically categorize the motion events that happen on your camera.” The new feature is processing 8 million activities in a day.