The future of Ring: “people want simplicity”

At Amazon’s Devices and Services Event in New York last month, I spoke to Dave Ward, Ring’s UK and International Managing Director about the growth of the brand and how the company is responding to the evolution of the smart home and going beyond the humble doorbell.

“The great thing with Ring as well is you can start from one device. You’re just in the market for a doorbell and you start there and it’s like, ‘well maybe the camera, maybe I’ll have more’, I quite like that.

“I think people want simplicity, right? When Sonos came out in the audio market you had these high-end installs [which were] hardwired and this sort of thing. Sonos came out and it was a case of ‘I want that power, I want that simplicity’ and it’s similar to that for Ring.

“You think about incumbents with wired solutions that take some time to install and maintain. But you can do this yourself. Now of course you can bring someone else in as well if you want to do [an advanced] install, but we see people absolutely adopting it themselves.”

In terms of the new products, Ward is excited about the possibilities ahead: “if I think about the 4K retinal vision, the 2K with retinal vision as well … our image quality on our standard camera is incredibly great. I mean, I have so many people come to me and say you’ve got great image quality. image quality, and that’s because we spent a decade [working on it].

“I was just talking to some journalists from Japan, and they were saying, if you think about DSLR as a good example, it’s got one focal point. We have to do a focal point across the whole image. We have to get the shadow right, we have to get the clarity right, and we’ve been doing that all the way.

“So when we come to 2K and 4K, we want to really build this up and go even further. So we’ve taken our time over it, and I think we’ve got a product that is just transformational. The quality, the way we’re streaming, the way that we’re making sure that you get every last bit of that image… because we’re not downsampling or anything like that.”

Since Ring’s 4K doorbell is wired, I suggest to Ward that the process of installing a wired doorbell remains a barrier. “Wired doorbells are interesting because you’re either in a category where you have an existing wired doorbell and you’ve really got to go, you know, you might need to do a little bit of adjustment, but pretty much you’re going to be wiring that quite quickly, or you don’t.

“If you’re in the don’t category, we try to solve for you if you want a wired solution with, you know, we have a plug-in adapter, we have an ability for an electrician to install one that goes into your fuse board, for instance, so we give lots of options, but most people there would gravitate towards a battery doorbell at that point.

Search Party and better app features

Search Party is a way to find lost pets via shared footage – obviously anybody can share  footage straight from the Ring app but this brings a more community-focused element to the fore, specifically for lost animals. “They’re part of the family. I’ve got a dog and it’s like if our dog goes out and goes missing, the kids are distraught. That ability to be able to find the animal and pair you back with the neighbour I think is hugely powerful. And we do it in the right way – it’s privacy centric. We’re making sure we’re not sharing details… we’re building it in a way that makes puts you in control.

Putting that power into people’s hands for the neighbourhood, I think that’s incredibly important. Making neighbourhoods safe has been… It’s one of the three reasons I originally came to Ring, because I think if you can just help one family in their time of need, it makes you day.

Does Ward think that Ring has fixed the problem of too many notifications from its doorbells, something it has also worked on with the new Familiar Faces feature? “Yeah, I mean, it’s feedback we create ourselves. We’re users ourselves. You know, I think about the day that we built the first product… that ability to get a notification that someone was on your doorstep. It was like, wow, this is incredible.

“I’m somewhere else in the world and I get told that something’s happening in my driveway. Today, we want to do more. We want to do better with that. So Smart Video Description give you context, real world context very quickly. And it’s one of these services that when you use it, this is great. Because you do get better notification fatigue.

“We give you the ability to reduce your notifications, change the zone, make sure you focus in the right areas. We give all you those tools. But once you’ve gone to that next level, with AI and being able to do Smart Video Description, it is just so powerful. It’s like, there’s two kids walking down the drive, and it’s eight o’clock in the morning. So yeah, they’re going to school. But if I’m traveling and there’s a notification of someone peering into my car. I’m gonna go in and hit the siren and do something.

Evolving the Ring design

I also asked Ward about the design of the new products, which hasn’t evolved a great deal – Ring doorbells have always looked very similar. What’s the design direction for the brand? “We’re evolving the design is the best way to describe it. So our original doorbell design has really sort of taken us through – to your point – it’s iconic over the last 10 years.

“We want to try and maintain that authenticity of Ring, so you can tell it’s a Ring device, it’s still got all the great features, it has the line that goes around the outside, it’s got a similar sort of make-up of sizing, so if you think about the proportions for the black top and then the colour underneath. But we want to extend that out.

“I think it’s the right evolution, because I still think as you see that device, you know, I’ve got them on my house, for instance, and it’s interesting because, you know, my neighbours that have seen it, they’re like, oh, you’ve got a little doorbell. They know it’s Ring, right? They can tell. So yeah, it’s more of an evolution.

I ask if there’s a tension between wanting the products to blend in for the homeowner but stand out for security reasons. “Yeah, absolutely. And we do that in various different ways. I mean, obviously, you can still see the product, but I think it should seamlessly blend into your fixtures and fittings of the property. There’s nothing worse than, like, that ugly sort of, like, you know, old CCTV with a wiper on the front, right? You definitely don’t want that. The other way you do this is that all of our devices have got a signal that the device is recording.

“Because if you’re coming up to a property and you see that blue light appear, you actually notice it, even though it’s really small. And that’s the deterrent.”

The choice between Blink and Ring

We asked Ward about the relationship between Amazon’s Ring and Blink brands. “It’s a question that many people ask us. If you step back a little bit and think about the customer segments that we’re really addressing, and the features that we’re building, there’s two very different groups of people. So with Blink, what we see is we tend to see a cohort of customers that may be experiencing home security for the first time, and maybe they’re thinking about, ‘what do I just want to protect in the garden?’ They want a very, very simple, easy to set up device, something they can set and forget with the right features for that price.

‘When you look at Ring, you tend to find they’re thinking about the home security in a much different way. Maybe something [has been] happening. What they’re looking for is a set of premium products with premium features that allow you to have a holistic view of the home.

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