Given enough time a particular camera, location, recorder or other piece of equipment WILL fail and your system won’t be capturing the information you bought it for. If you don’t have a management system monitoring your video systems, Erwin Schrödinger might say it is both working and broken at the same time. You won’t know for sure which it really is until you try to use it.
A key component of any managed video system is that all components are actively monitored and are pro-actively repaired. Given the number of components which are distributed about IP networks in today’s surveillance systems it is critical that these are monitored in an automated way. Redundancy helps reduce the frequency of failures for sure, but one still needs to know when a component fails so it can be replaced.

A key component of managed video is that it must work like it’s just “built-in” to your network.

Step by step, access to video, video acquisition, storage and management will become components of “the network”.

The form factors that these components will take will vary.  They may be separate hardware devices, or expansion cards for an existing devices or software added to some device.  But the end result is that these components will become increasingly integrated as part of “the network infrastructure”, just as email, websites, fileservers, routers and switches are all part of the network infrastructure.
Why?  To maximize the effectiveness of video and minimize the overhead.

Effectiveness is massively improved when the video can be linked to data.  This data resides on other systems in the network, but unless they are linked together, value is lost.  Effectiveness is also significantly improved when access to the video when many people can view the video.  Outside of internal security, there is external security, such as first responders.  Then there’s operations, marketing, maintenance, management, Human resources and the list goes on.  All of these people are on the network now and could take advantage of the appropriate, authorized access to video.

Even at a medium sized business thousands of components may be involved in a video system.  Installation and operation of these must be as plug and play as possible.  Users with basic computer skills need to be able to jump in and find what they are looking for quickly.  Component failures must be rare, easily detected and remedied.

By integrating components into the network infrastructure one can apply established methods for remotely operating, monitoring, repairing and controlling access to massive, distributed video systems.

The other day I posted about an acronym that is set to blind-side a fair number of providers in the video space.  I offered a couple of hints about what it was.  The last hint was the most obvious – look in your wallet.   If you are like most people, you carry a credit card in your wallet.  If again, you are like most people, you probably spend money in retail stores and restaurants using that credit card.

What does that have to do with video and what is the acronym already?  If you are worried that somehow surveillance cameras are recording you standing at the register with your credit card out and that someone can look at that video, read the info on your card and steal your identity – don’t be.  I would wager that even the HD cameras that are out today would not be capable of such a feat.  Add to that the fact that the businesses that own the cameras are putting them there for other reasons and would not try that (you just gave said business your credit card, they don’t need a picture of it to get your info!)

The acronym that is likely to blind-side those unprepared in the video industry and the reason video and credit cards are related is a thing called PCI DSS, or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.  Wiki has a good definition of this term, but I’ll paraphrase by saying that it is a set of standards that companies that take credit cards have to abide by to ensure that they are appropriately protecting their customers’ credit card info.  It is driven by Visa and others in the credit card industry and to quote a good technology friend of mine, it is “non-trivial” to achieve PCI DSS certification.

Why is this relevant to video?  The obvious guess for those that understand how video systems are being tied to Point of Sale transactions is that somehow the video systems are also capturing credit card data.  The quick answer to that hypothesis is no.   Most video systems don’t capture any credit card data at all.  Another hole in that hypothesis is the fact that even those video systems that aren’t ever connected to the POS system at all are going to run into PCI DSS complications.

I’ll explain why in another post.

I’ve seen several claims about video management systems that scale to support thousands of cameras at remote locations over the Internet. Some of these claims state you don’t need a storage device (such as an NVR or DVR) at your remote sites. But that “no local storage” claim doesn’t hold true for broadband Internet connections.

Remotely viewing video is great!  But if you’re working with broadband, you’re stuck dealing with a limited amount of upload speed at your remote site. While one might have multiple megabits of download bandwidth, the upstream of all broadband connections is commonly limited to between 256Kbps and 768Kbps (or about 0.3 to 0.8 megabits).

In North America, the only option available to get more upload bandwidth for most is to buy a T1 at 5 to 10 times the cost of a typical DSL or Cable modem line. This will get you 1.5Mbps of upload capacity.

Now let’s look at a typical camera streaming at just 5 frames per second at a tiny 320×240 video resolution can use around 100-250Kbps. That’s good enough quality for a very basic video viewing experience. Up the resolution to 640×480 and 15 frames per second to get near (but not quite) “TV-like” quality and you’re looking at 400Kbps – 1.5Mbps. So if you only have a regular broadband connection and more than one camera and you want to record all the video, you’re going to have to store video locally.

Businesses are increasingly using video as a core part of their operations. Whether it’s looking at video from a remote location for security or to identify areas of improvement or playing video on monitors for advertisements or signage, companies are tackling the problem of moving and managing large amounts of video to and from a significant number of locations. These new applications are generating very strong returns on investment, but bring with them a level of complexity and management requirements that IT organizations are not always interested in or capable of supporting with their current resources. Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS) is the rapidly growing category of service providers that can help companies deploy and administer video applications across a potentially large number of disparate locations.