Managed Video
Keeps itself running smoothly
IT staff happy.
In my last post, I discussed the concept of Software-as-a-Service; now what does that have to do with managed video or specifically video surveillance?
Most digital video surveillance systems are hardware centric. They are designed, built, and installed as stand-alone servers with application software to configure, search, view and manage video. In short, they look like enterprise servers to the business.
And therein lays the problem. These systems have to be bought, installed and maintained. Someone with IT skills has to do this. In addition, Someone with IT skills has to worry about virus protection, and updates, lest this system become a Trojan Horse. And, as I’m sure you all know, that Someone with IT skills is pretty darn busy with other Important Business Issues (like insuring your labor management system is upgraded before Lent or pushing a point-of-sale upgrade). Oh, and they are also expensive, and the good ones are hard to find.
Of course, most people follow the install-and-forget model. This works well as long as you don’t want or need new features and don’t care if the system is broken during that all-important night you get robbed.
How do Managed Video and SaaS solve this problem? The simplest example is an IP camera, installed at a customer premise location streaming video back to a hosted application portal. The user accesses the camera and manipulates the video via the hosted software. However, this simple case has a major flaw: each IP camera stream consumes significant broadband bandwidth and thus only works for a 1-2 camera installation or a business with a really large Internet access pipe.
For the rest of us, there is a simple, cost-effective solution: the video appliance. This is a specialized server that is designed for easy installation with no maintenance. A video appliance has its software and hardware combined together. It can be plugged into an existing network and begins operating immediately. A typical video appliance can connect to traditional analog (e.g., NTSC or PAL) camera feeds and is capable of storing video locally on an internal disk drive.
Typically the video appliance is a very simple beast. It captures video and audio, encodes it in a format such as MPEG-4, and stores it to disk. By itself, it’s not very useful. But couple a video appliance with a service provider that has a managed video application, and the result is powerful indeed.
You have instant access to the status of each of your video appliances, and your provider can react quickly when one goes down. You can view video from multiple sites, live or recorded, from anywhere on the Internet with your web browser. You have accomplished this with out installing any software. And the best part is that your software application is improved and expanded on a regular basis. Oh, and by the way, all this happens without having to engage Someone with IT skills!
