I’ve been deluged with thousands of responses to my retail exception reporting quiz (well, would you believe, hundreds? how about 10?). The answer, was that #1 came from a restaurant and #2 from a retailer. Hard to tell them apart, eh?
Wouldn’t it be interesting to combine a state-of-the-art, purpose built exception reporting system with state of the art video management, ala MVaaS? Here is how easy it could be.
Imagine the reporting system has, at the end of the day, a reports that indicates a series of incidents of questionable business practice. The reporting system knows the store, the register, and the time of day. How easily could you show video along side that? With a typical video system, it might be quite difficult and would likely involve arduously coping each video segment of interest off of the DVR onto the reporting system.
Here is how an MVaaS system could do it in three steps:
- issue a request to search for video to the MVaaS server. Specify store (e.g., DVR), register (e.g., camera), and time of day. The MVaaS server returns a list of clips it found
- initiate a video player in your web browser
- instruct the video player to play the clips that were found in step one.
Each clip will stream to the browser. There is no need to wait for a file download. The clip can be controlled via simple VCR-like controls.
Sounds pretty simple, eh?