Comments on: I don’t believe in magic

By: dloher

dloher — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:09:09 +0000

Hi Steve, you have a good point. There are a lot of acronyms out there and it's not always clear what service is being offered by SaaS, MVaaS, Hosted Video, Managed Surveillance and even cloud computing. The acronym MVaaS is meant to be a play off SaaS, where software is hosted and used via the Web. With MVaaS we wanted to convey that the whole video surveillance system is hosted by a managed services provider. A very similar business model is a managed telecommunications provider who operates corporate networks on behalf of their customers, with customer premise equipment as well as a hosted components like VoIP switches, websites, email services and of course, the network backbone. There's a "living" definition for MVaaS at wikipedia that you might check out.

By: Steve Lewis

Steve Lewis — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:17:21 +0000

Can I just jump in here and say the MVaaS is a horrible acronym. It sounds like something your wife tells you to see a doctor about cutting after you have your second kid. It is important to make a distinction between the various kinds of "off-prem" video surveillance. Managed Video Surveillance connotes that someone is watching the video and alerting the customer when someone or something is seen (Video Alarm Verification). Hosted Video Surveillance means that the NVR resides in the data center rather than on-prem. Video can be monitor by others or not. There are many advantages to Software as a Service a.k.a. cloud computing model (Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com , Microsoft to name of few are staking their claims in that space as we type) and there is no doubt in my mind it will be the future of surveillance. What has slowed the adoption of surveillance in this area is camera cost, bandwidth and storage. The megapixel cameras that can store relevant video and stream on demand will help solve two of the three problems, but it seems like the holy grail of the $99 camera is just that.

By: Steve Russell

Steve Russell — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:59:03 +0000

You can also use something like 3VR's SmartCam (” target=”_blank”>http://www.3VR.com). It uses analytics to identify, callout, and preserve the native resolution of important content like faces and/or license plates, while the rest of the video feed is compressed as needed. For instance, 3VR offers a 5MP camera that wokes very well over a DSL connectoin using this approach. You don't get all the video at 5MP, but generally you get what counts at that quality.

By: Steve Russell

Steve Russell — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:59:03 +0000