This article provides design guidance for building cost-effective video surveillance platforms for smart homes using AWS IoT services.

• Use Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for serverless video ingestion without managing infrastructure
• Choose between HLS/DASH (charges for data egress) or WebRTC peer-to-peer (minimal egress costs)
• Reduce costs by lowering bitrate, using efficient codecs like H.265, and dynamic frame rate adjustment
• WebRTC with peer-to-peer connections avoids data transfer charges; TURN relay incurs streaming minute fees
• Use AWS IoT Core with X.509 certificates for secure device management and provisioning
• Implement serverless architecture with Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, and API Gateway for authentication
• Includes step-by-step walkthrough for deploying example surveillance platform using Cloud9

The article demonstrates how to architect a scalable, cost-efficient smart camera solution combining Kinesis Video Streams with AWS IoT Core for device management and serverless backend services.