In the telecom engineering world a huge focus area is on having inexpensive, robust devices out at the edge of the network which could be 100% remotely managed using automated processes.  All the edge devices (say a router that is at a customer’s location) must have a very consistent and methodical way of being configured and managed in order to scale up to serve millions of customers.

In the managed video world, probably the best inexpensive and robust  edge devices are “DVR appliances”.  But unlike a managed Ethernet Switch, an IP router or DSL modem, you can’t pick and choose your DVR box from a list of vendors and hook up to one’s centralized viewing, command and control system.

In the managed network equipment world, we have well documented SNMP interfaces, configuration files and scriptable command lines that can be integrated into centralized management systems.  But in the DVR world there are proprietary protocols, no remote access to important administrative features and a lack of scriptable or programmable interfaces to get at all the functionality of the DVR.

For central viewing, command and control we made our own Envysion Video service which is built from the ground up to scale to manage information events (mostly point of sale information) and video.  We also had to make our own DVR appliance (The Envysion EnVR) to meet our needs, but it’d be great if we could buy them from 3-5 vendors instead.  Maybe someday.

In the late 80’s and even early 90’s, IP networks and the products used to build them were very immature.  Companies were building network routers out of PC’s running off the shelf unix systems and the software being used to run the Internet backbone was literally, fresh out of the lab from last week.  Each box had hand-configured specialized configurations by engineers with a lot of tacit knowledge of how the system worked. Some vendors had proprietary systems that were easier to manage, but only worked with their own software, between their boxes and nobody elses.  This just didn’t fly very far in the network world where everything has to talk to each other.

Being a “network guy”, I see a lot significant parallels to this in the world of network video.