Congratulations to Timesight who recently received $4.5M in new funding.   It looks like they’ve recently launched a Video storage appliance which implements “Video Lifecycle Management (VLM)”.

It seems that VLM boils down to reducing the frame rate and resolution of stored video images over time.  Ie: the older a video is, the lower the quality.  The idea of course being that older video is less likely to contain valuable information and therefore can be compressed more and more as it gets older and older.

This is a very reasonable thing to do and is a valuable cost reduction.  In fact, I go as far to say that long term storage of large number of Megapixel video feeds is not feasible from a cost perspective in most use cases without video management like this.  Mega-pixel cameras are a particularly good use case for this technology becaues they have a lot of room for reducing quality while still retaining a usable image.  I wouldn’t be suprised if this method becomes industry standard best practice for storing megapixel resolution video surveillance.

Another thing that stands out to me about Timesight’s storage appliance is that this VLM process is something that  traditional network based storage systems (Network Appliance, etc…) don’t do.

I also found it interesting that the CEO of Timesight, Charles Foley, used to run Tacit networks which was bought by Packeteer (now owned by BlueCoat), a notable and successful network/telecom equipment company.

Good luck Timesight!