Advice On My Surveillance Startup Idea

Gautam, welcome!

The Tenaja group 'article' is 5 year old promotional play by the now out of business Intransa Corporation.

No electronics can be 'relied upon completely.' They will die at some point, just like companies go out of business.

Are you personally having problems with DVRs failing or? I am trying to understand how we can best provide you feedback.

Doing print screens and pasting them to Word documents or embedding them into some other format is indeed a convuluted procoess, but at the same time usually an unnecessary one as every system I've seen has some way of exporting an image straight to a JPG, PNG or BMP file. And every DVR from the past 5 years or so has some way to export video as a common AVI or MOV file. Is there a particular brand you're coming across that does not do this? If so it's a rare one and not that common, or maybe a very "old" model.

As for your process for housing establishments and smaller businesses, it's a common one that they rarely ever check their systems after they are installed unless an incident occurs. So if a problem with the system occurs, like a camera going out, they often don't notice it until they go looking for video. No matte rhow many times you advise them to check their systems intermittently, the majority don't. Cloud based recording is a developing process, but limited by available Internet bandwidths and customer unrealistic expectations for performance.

Gautam, DVRs do fail but there's no 'nightmare' nor 'crisis'. This is a theme pushed forward by companies like Intransa, selling centralized storage or VSaaS companies, trying to motivate people to store in the cloud. The problem is the economics of cloud storage (thereby eliminating the DVR) is weak (see our VSaaS ROI analysis).

As for savings images, Luis has already clearly stated what the modern status is for DVRs.

Feel free to explain what you are doing here as others can therefore learn from and provide feedback.

Guatam, I am intrigued by what you are attempting to devise.... It seems like a tall order to pull off all that you mention.

To clarify, you are interested in doing all of those things for 'images', correct? ...and I mean images (JPEG, GIF, etc) vs video clips (AVI, MPEG, etc)?

"While it's playing, you continue to make clicks of frames that are relevant (no pause needed) ... Each time you make the click, an image is created and aggregated at the same time in a form"

Who in surveillance has a need for this? What would the use case be?

Let's say this is a greatly needed feature that surveillance users would really want. It's something that could be copied fairly easily (at least the selection part, not the cloud management one).

My gut feel is that this is more of a consumer / entertainment / photography application, which might be a winner (or not) but is a poor compliment for most security/surveillance users.

Gautam, are you looking to build your own DVR/recorder?

Btw, see our VMS exporting comparison for how different VMSes handle this.

If the software is separate, does the user need to export the video first from the recorder?

I think that's a deal breaker. It really needs to be built in. The whole point of this feature is to make it easy to share video. However, the plan here requires first exporting video, which is a real barrier.

I am sure you would be happy but I doubt it would be mutual. These sort of third party integrations rarely happens. Consider Briefcam who has spent years and millions of dollars trying to add on specialized synopsis / search with very few integrations.

In my honest opinion, unless it was super cheap, say under $50 a license, I don't think there'd be that much interest. Even then, I haven't found a situation yet where I wished there was something like that.

If your working on making some revolutionary software, how about some middleware piece that facilitates integration between VMS and access control systems that don't have direct integration yet. As ridiculously slow as this industry is coming up with inter-system communication standards, that's something I've been really wishing there was a solution for.

Thanks Hal, for the feedback. If you'd like to give it a try, I am more than happy to send you a beta to play with.

Thanks Sean. I agree Jing is great. But, I think we are far different. I am going to share a link to my presentation on my story and philosophy.

Complete Your Surveillance Story... My strong belief is that those who have installed CCTVs should take one small extra step...

John. I seem to be missing a point, or conveying my idea incorrectly. As I've mentioned earlier, I am not speaking of getting my software embedded into 3rd party systems. I am simply saying "get a video footage from your DVR, and let our software help in taking quick screen shots, adding tags, sending to MS Office, PDF etc". From what I've learnt through companies in this space in India, after an incident, a CCTV footage is handed over to the police. I suppose that this method is used all over the world. My point is, that if the affected party itself takes the screen shots with great ease, adds the needed information to each screen shot, and hands over this information in an MS Office format, along with the video footage, things would be easier for law enforcement. I continue to maintain that the best party to take screen shots, and add relevant information, is the affected party. They would do themselves as well as law enforcement agencies, a great deal of good by being proactive, and taking the screen shots themselves. Where we come into the picture is our software that makes all this very easy. Thanks

We have 2 versions - one free, and one at a small yearly fee. Let's take the case of India, and any small city in it. There are thousands of cameras being installed every day. I believe that our free version can very easily build a name for itself as a must-have to (a) help law enforcement, when there is an incident (b) capture images from time to time - this ensures that people are taking care, so as to ensure that things are working. I believe that housing complexes, small and large enterprises, where such cameras are installed, would love to have a piece of software that makes things so easy for them. We will support the free version with advertising. The paid version would have a small yearly fee, based on the number of cameras. Let's take a case of a bank. There are thousands of ATM machines. Each one normally is attached to the premises of a bank. If they have our software sitting there, it would be easy to monitor, and also not lose valuable time in case of an incident. We do intent to tie-up with leading players who undertake the job of installation. That would give us instant adoption and traction. Even the free version does a lot. If you take a look at the deck I shared yesterday, it'll give you an idea. I will share the software in a few days.

Gautam,

I saw the deck slides and I've read the whole string.

To clarify (again): In order for the end user to tag, classify or notate images to be sent to 'the cloud', the end user would have to export the entire video database (each day), watch it, and while watching be clicking and notating and firing images to the cloud (for each camera)?

If that is the case, I think you are vastly underestimating the time requirements to accomplish this task (every day).

Your logic statement regarding the reasons people should pay attention to their systems more closely is sound. Unfortunately, the vast majority will simply not do it.

Lots of modern systems have added built-in health monitoring sensors that alert when something is wrong because of this learned phenomenon.

I like new ways to look at stuff.... but, from experience, I think your plan relies too heavily on the assumption that end users will do what you think they logically should. :(