Milestone Essential will be free for up to 8 cams..no recording limit...

Cool. So March Networks Command is free for 8 cameras but with a 1 week retention time. Milestone trumps that.
 
Making Essential free for 8 cams is great but I think the good news ends here. Adding yearly paid subscription packs for further expanding the Essential installation sounds me like a suicide attempt for the product. People will rather go for the next Express version (hopefully Milestone will not apply subscription packs there also). Subscription packs will make sense in case Milestone could provide pure cloud service including cloud storage… but I think Milestone is far from that point yet.
 
They dont make money on free vms...so yes, its simply a way to force users to buy express if they need more than 8ch....the price of express will also come down to 70 per channel, no subscription.
 
fenderman said:
They dont make money on free vms...so yes, its simply a way to force users to buy express if they need more than 8ch....
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That's one way of looking at it. Also look at it from a marketing and exposure perspective. They get people who run this stuff at home, or on small sites which gets them people with exposure and experience. Next time one of them works for an organization where someone needs to select a VMS they get a strong recommendation internally and they're more likely to make that choice. It's a really good marketing move. I don't particularly rate Milestone, but they certainly do slick marketing well and their system is capable of larger systems.
 
Brad_C said:
That's one way of looking at it. Also look at it from a marketing and exposure perspective. They get people who run this stuff at home, or on small sites which gets them people with exposure and experience. Next time one of them works for an organization where someone needs to select a VMS they get a strong recommendation internally and they're more likely to make that choice. It's a really good marketing move. I don't particularly rate Milestone, but they certainly do slick marketing well and their system is capable of larger systems.
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Home users who have any say in larger installations are an extreme minority...
 
fenderman said:
They dont make money on free vms...so yes, its simply a way to force users to buy express if they need more than 8ch....the price of express will also come down to 70 per channel, no subscription.
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I think I have run into this exact problem with Milestone Xprotect Essentials.

I am currently running Essentials R3 and using all 8 free camera licenses.

I now want to add 1 more camera to have 9 total.

With Essentials, my only option appears to be to purchase an 8 channel license pack at $400 per year. That would give me 16 total camera licenses of which I will only be using 9 (10 at the very most as this is for a home installation).

This seems like a precarious situation. I really want to add that 9th camera, but not for $400 extra per year when the other 7 licenses will not be used. This is a pickle....

I haven't researched the Express license set up yet to see if it will be better in some way but I really wish I could just use the 8 free licenses and pay $70 for 1 extra license to get me to 9.

This situation hurts my inner child greatly. My inner child is crying right now... :(

I almost wonder if purchasing the Dahua multi cam would get me around this situation by allowing me to drop one camera by adding the panoramic cam.

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

I haven't checked yet to see if Essentials would do something sad like charge 3 licenses for this one panoramic cam since it has 3 sensors. Hopefully they count it as 1 camera license only. Ahh. I see that camera is a small fortune so that won't work either... :( :(
 
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LittleScoobyMaster said:
I think I have run into this exact problem with Milestone Xprotect Essentials.

I am currently running Essentials R3 and using all 8 free camera licenses.

I now want to add 1 more camera to have 9 total.

With Essentials, my only option appears to be to purchase an 8 channel license pack at $400 per year. That would give me 16 total camera licenses of which I will only be using 9 (10 at the very most as this is for a home installation).

This seems like a precarious situation. I really want to add that 9th camera, but not for $400 extra per year when the other 7 licenses will not be used. This is a pickle....

I haven't researched the Express license set up yet to see if it will be better in some way but I really wish I could just use the 8 free licenses and pay $70 for 1 extra license to get me to 9.

This situation hurts my inner child greatly. My inner child is crying right now... :(

I almost wonder if purchasing the Dahua multi cam would get me around this situation by allowing me to drop one camera by adding the panoramic cam.

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

I haven't checked yet to see if Essentials would do something sad like charge 3 licenses for this one panoramic cam since it has 3 sensors. Hopefully they count it as 1 camera license only. Ahh. I see that camera is a small fortune so that won't work either... :( :(
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So just switch to Blue Iris...
 
tangent said:
So just switch to Blue Iris...
Click to expand...

I still have a copy of BI lying around but I prefer Xprotect over BI. I may just use it for the extra camera though. Or I might just use one of the camera's built in software but it would be nice and streamlined to run them all on the same solution. I've found that Xprotect really saves CPU cycles quite a bit over BI and the playback features of Xprotect are pretty slick.
 
LittleScoobyMaster said:
I think I have run into this exact problem with Milestone Xprotect Essentials.

I am currently running Essentials R3 and using all 8 free camera licenses.

I now want to add 1 more camera to have 9 total.

With Essentials, my only option appears to be to purchase an 8 channel license pack at $400 per year. That would give me 16 total camera licenses of which I will only be using 9 (10 at the very most as this is for a home installation).

This seems like a precarious situation. I really want to add that 9th camera, but not for $400 extra per year when the other 7 licenses will not be used. This is a pickle....

I haven't researched the Express license set up yet to see if it will be better in some way but I really wish I could just use the 8 free licenses and pay $70 for 1 extra license to get me to 9.

This situation hurts my inner child greatly. My inner child is crying right now... :(

I almost wonder if purchasing the Dahua multi cam would get me around this situation by allowing me to drop one camera by adding the panoramic cam.

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

DH-IPC-PFW8601N-H-A180

I haven't checked yet to see if Essentials would do something sad like charge 3 licenses for this one panoramic cam since it has 3 sensors. Hopefully they count it as 1 camera license only. Ahh. I see that camera is a small fortune so that won't work either... :( :(
Click to expand...
Find a solution for this yet? Im stuck as well with a 9th cam
 
1) pay a license fee
2) run a second instance of the software
3) stream two cams to FFMPEG, stitch them and stream back out as a single RTSP stream into Milestone.
 
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Neil Sidhu said:
Find a solution for this yet? Im stuck as well with a 9th cam
Click to expand...

If you have the capability of running virtualization like VMware, you can run multiple instances, of course with an 8 camera limit per. Of course since Milestone uses Windows, that means you'll need a copy of Windows for each instance.

Milestone is very good software, I've currently installed it with several clients that have larger 30+ camera installations and its crazy how few resources it needs to run. The downsides of course are cost, up-front and renewals.

Express licenses per channel I think are in the $70 per channel range (before adding in support, etc) for up-front costs, then you got the recurring support costs which I think we just did a project renewal that was $26 per camera for 3 years?

It used to be that XProtect Essential was the entry level and wasn't terribly expensive but they changed things up over the past few years a few times (XProtect Go, Xprotect Essential, Essential+)
 
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