I wanted to provide some feedback about my brand new Nest Floodlight Camera. I have several Google devices in my home already - two Nest doorbells, a Google Home, Pixel phones, along with 3rd party devices such as Kasa smart plugs. They all work flawlessly.
I installed the wired Nest Camera above my garage to replace an existing basic motion floodlight. I purchased this because I wanted a camera in that area and my experience with the other Nest Camera products has been so fantastic. Upon installation, the camera spent several minutes updating the firmware (to 1.61 OPERMASTER 301354), and I was excited to see the live video stream and also the motion capture events.
Here's where the probelms begin: In the Google home app, this camera rarely connects. When I tap on the Camera, I get "Live Video unavailable". This happens about 95% of the time. I still seem to receive event notifications, but when I click the notification or look in the history, I get a period block of 20-30 seconds of video, and the rest of the feed shows "This video isn't available yet." It doesn't seem to matter how long I wait for, the video never arrives. I'm on a 2.4 GHz network and the signal stength is excellent in that area.
Google, you've really dropped the ball on this product. I replaced a totally functional $40 floodlight with an expensive Google Nest Floodlight Camera (for $380 CDN!) that has not worked at all. I've read through many forum posts describing the exact same issue and have followed all troubleshooting steps. I've reset the camera, powered it off for several minutes, removed it from my Google Home app, etc. Same issue.
I'm a long-term loyal customer of Google products, but this one is so bad that it will make me seriously consider buying anything in your smart home product line in the future. Also, I feel really ripped off. Google Product Management should know better than to release something that has such a flaky product experience.
