Matter Cameras Explained

For years, cameras have been the most stubbornly locked-in part of any smart home. Your bulbs, plugs and sensors could be persuaded to talk to each other. Your cameras lived in the manufacturer's app, sent video to the manufacturer's cloud, and refused to appear anywhere else without a subscription.

That's now changing. Matter 1.5, finalised in November 2025, finally brought cameras, video doorbells and intercoms into the standard. Through 2026 the first compatible products have started to appear. It's a genuinely significant shift—but it's also being oversold, so here's what it actually does and doesn't fix.

What Matter Is, Briefly

Matter is a common language for smart home devices, developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance and backed by Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung. A Matter device can be added to any Matter-compatible system rather than being tied to one brand's app. There are now well over 700 certified products, and it has become the default expectation on decent kit rather than a niche feature.

Cameras were the obvious gap. Video is harder to standardise than a light switch—there are streams, codecs, two-way audio, doorbell chimes and snapshots to agree on—which is why it took until version 1.5.

What Matter 1.5 Actually Adds

• Cameras, video doorbells and intercoms as a proper device type, covering Wi-Fi, PoE and Ethernet cameras rather than wireless-only.
• Standardised live streaming and control, so a camera can show up in a different manufacturer's app without a custom integration.
• Blinds, awnings and garage doors got improved support in the same release, which is quietly useful if you're automating a whole house.

A follow-up release in March 2026 tidied up the camera side further—better handling of multiple video and audio streams, HEIC snapshots, and more sensible doorbell and chime behaviour. That sounds like small print, but it's the difference between a feature that demos well and one that works every day.

Samsung SmartThings was first out of the gate, enabling Matter cameras in December 2025, with Aqara, Eve and others bringing compatible hardware through 2026. Support on the other big platforms is arriving at different speeds.

Why This Is Worth Caring About

Two real benefits, in our view.

One app instead of four. We regularly walk into houses with a doorbell from one brand, a driveway camera from another and a nanny cam from a third, each in its own app with its own login. Nobody checks three apps. In practice that means nobody checks any of them. A single view of every camera is not a luxury feature—it's the difference between a system that gets used and one that doesn't.

Less dependence on somebody's cloud. Standardised local streaming means your video doesn't have to make a round trip to a data centre for you to look at your own front door. That's better for privacy, better for latency, and it means the camera keeps doing something useful if the manufacturer's servers have a bad day—or if the manufacturer stops existing, which happens more often than the industry likes to admit.

What It Doesn't Fix

Here's the fine print that the launch coverage tends to skip.

Matter doesn't standardise recording. It covers streaming and control. Where your footage is stored, how long it's kept and what it costs is still entirely up to the manufacturer. A camera can be fully Matter-certified and still charge you monthly for clip history.

Matter doesn't standardise the clever bits. Person detection, vehicle recognition, package alerts, activity zones—all of that stays proprietary. Expect to see the basic stream in the shared app and the good features only in the manufacturer's own.

Certification isn't retrospective. Your existing cameras almost certainly won't gain Matter support via a firmware update. Some brands will do it where the hardware allows; most won't bother.

Our Take as Installers

We fit two quite different things, and Matter matters more to one than the other.

For proper security systems: it changes little

If you want reliable CCTV—cameras that record continuously, footage that's usable as evidence, no monthly fee—the answer is still wired PoE cameras recording to an on-site NVR. That setup already gives you local storage, local processing and independence from anyone's cloud. Matter's headline benefits are things a properly specified CCTV installation has had all along. We explain the trade-offs in wired vs wireless CCTV.

For the consumer layer: it's a real improvement

Doorbells, a camera watching the side gate, something keeping an eye on the garage—this is where brand lock-in has genuinely hurt people, and where Matter helps most. If you're buying that sort of kit now, checking for Matter support costs nothing and keeps your options open.

Should You Wait?

If you need security now, don't wait. Standards adoption takes years, and a house with no cameras is not made safer by a promising specification.

If you're replacing a doorbell or adding a camera or two over the next few months, it's worth asking the question—the product range is growing steadily and the price premium is small.

And if you're buying anything else for the house—bulbs, sensors, locks, blinds—look for the Matter logo as a matter of habit. Not because you need it today, but because it means the device will still be useful when you change platform, and that's what turns a smart home into an investment rather than a subscription. We cover the full picture in our guide to whole-home smart integration, and if privacy is your main concern, what you should actually worry about is the more useful read.