How to get alerts from the CCTV cameras you already own

Most South African homes with CCTV only look at the footage after something has happened. Here are the four realistic ways to change that, with the honest trade-offs of each.

If you already have cameras, you have already paid for the hard part: eyes on your property. What almost nobody has is something watching those eyes at 02:00. This guide covers the four options actually available in South Africa, roughly cheapest to most expensive.

1. The built-in motion alerts on your DVR or camera app

Cost: free, already there. The catch: almost everyone turns them off within a fortnight.

Traditional motion detection compares pixels between frames. It cannot tell a person from a moth on the lens, a tree in wind, a car's headlights sweeping a wall, or rain. On a typical street-facing gate camera this means dozens of notifications a day, at which point the human brain does the sensible thing and starts ignoring them — which is worse than having no alerts at all, because now you believe you are covered.

An alarm you have learned to ignore is not an alarm. It is a notification you swipe away.

If you go this route, at minimum draw a detection mask that excludes the street and pavement, and raise the sensitivity threshold. It will still fire on animals and weather.

2. Your installer's cloud plan

Cost: typically R80–R300 per camera per month. The catch: your video leaves the property, and it is still usually motion-based.

Many camera brands sell a cloud subscription that uploads clips and pushes notifications. This works, but three things are worth knowing: your footage now lives on someone else's server, upload eats your data cap (a real issue on LTE), and unless the plan explicitly says "person detection" or "AI", you are paying monthly for the same pixel-difference alerts you already had for free.

3. Armed response

Cost: roughly R400–R900 a month for a home, plus call-out fees. The catch: it is triggered by beams and panic buttons, not by your cameras.

Armed response is genuinely valuable — someone physically comes. But most contracts respond to alarm-panel triggers, not camera events, and the guard arrives with no idea what they are walking into. Many customers keep armed response and add camera-based alerting, so that when they press for help they can already say "one male, at the back gate, ninety seconds ago" and send the photo.

4. AI detection added to your existing cameras

Cost: from about R250 a month for a couple of cameras. The catch: it needs a small box on your network and a little setup care.

This is the newest option and the one that has changed most in the last two years. A small computer sits on your network, reads your existing camera streams, and runs a neural network that has been trained to recognise people — not movement. The difference in practice is stark: a cat crossing the driveway is correctly identified as a cat and ignored; a person climbing the wall is not.

Two things make or break it:

• Zones. You must define the region of each camera that matters. A gate camera that includes the public pavement will alert on every pedestrian. The same camera cropped to the driveway inside your wall alerts on the person who should not be there.
• What happens next. A notification you sleep through is useless. The useful systems escalate — message first, then a phone call that rings until someone answers.

Comparing them honestly

Approach	Monthly	Alerts on	Main weakness
Built-in motion	R0	Any movement	False alarms; you switch it off
Brand cloud plan	R80–R300/cam	Usually motion	Video leaves site; data usage
Armed response	R400–R900	Beams, panic	Not driven by your cameras
AI on your cameras	From R250	People, in chosen zones	Needs a box and careful setup

What to check before you buy anything

1. Can your cameras give an RTSP stream? Nearly all IP cameras and DVR/NVRs from the last decade can. This is what any third-party system needs.
2. Is your recorder on a UPS? During load shedding, a camera system without backup power is simply off. Whatever you add should share that UPS.
3. Who actually gets the alert at 3am? Decide this before choosing a product. If the answer is "my phone, which is on silent", you need something that phones you.
4. What happens if the system itself fails? Ask directly. A system that goes quiet without telling you is the most dangerous outcome, because you will assume you are protected.