Be it video analytics, data analytics, intelligence based on the available data is paramount to making productive use of video. The most effective Managed Video service will “hook into” best of breed intelligence services.

Managed Video Systems should strive to be great at managing video and making it easy to link that video with data. But which data is important to you? This is a very complicated question and is wildly different depending on who is looking at the video and the application. For example, retail fraud prevention, physical security and manufacturing safety all require very different business intelligence solutions which are very specific to the problems they are trying to solve.

At a high level I can think of two very good ways to accomplish linking video and data.

1. Supply data links into the video application with timestamps of when the events are occurring.

2. Link video capabilities into data analytics applications.

Both allow users to see video associated with data and both allow an expert system to produce the data. Using web based systems for both the video and data analytics ought to make it less difficult to link them together compared with traditional computer applications running on individual computers.

To move from “less difficult” to “somewhat easy” some very simple standards for how to link to video need to put into place. This is an area ripe for innovators in Managed Video Services. The great thing is we already have all the tools we need to make this possible over the web. In my next post I’ll provide a little detail the number one tool we have available to make this possible.