Matter 1.5 Adds Native Camera Support Built on WebRTC

Matter 1.5 adds native camera support to the standard, allowing manufacturers to build and certify cameras that interoperate directly with Matter ecosystems using WebRTC as the transport. The new device category spans a wider set of forms than the word camera suggests: floodlight cameras, video doorbells, intercoms, audio doorbells, snapshot cameras, chimes and camera controllers each get a defined type.

Building on WebRTC rather than a bespoke streaming protocol is the decision worth noting. WebRTC is already implemented, already hardened by a decade of use in browsers, and already understood by the people who will have to debug it. Standards that invent their own media transport tend to spend years catching up on the problems that stack solved long ago.

Cameras were also the most conspicuous omission from Matter until now, and the omission had a practical consequence: a household could standardise everything except the devices with the most sensitive data and the strongest vendor lock-in. Whether this changes the market depends less on the specification than on whether the established camera vendors implement it, since their current position depends on the very lock-in the standard removes.