ASG's Security Solutions Blog

What Would You Do With An App For That?

  

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The other day I was having a conversation with some colleagues and the topic turned to technology and mobile applications. At this point I brought up that many video management solutions either have or are working on iPhone and other mobile device integration. In other words: Video Surveillance? There’s an app for that.

Basically, these applications allow you to view video on your iPhone from your CCTV cameras. Two systems that currently have applications like this are Milestone Systems and OnSSI. Milestone has partnered with Lextech Labs on their application called iRa C3 and OnSSI has partnered with mobiDEOS on their application named MobileCamViewer. While I haven’t seen either of these applications in action, it brings up a question: what would you do with it?

Let’s say that you had the ability to see quality, live video streams over your iPhone and could deliver that stream securely over either a WiFi network (think iPod Touch) or cellular network; what practically applications could you think of for this?

We thought of two right off the bat:

1. Guard Force Efficiency – Obviously the big reason to make this available is to give your guard force the ability to view video on the go. When was the last time you wanted a full time employee to sit behind a desk and do nothing but watch a video feed? By integrating remote monitoring with a VMS system, guards could receive alarms via text or email (depending on the system) and immediately log into the camera feed from their mobile device to check out what’s going on.
2. Parking Lot Safety/Security – How convenient would it be for your employees to be able to log in to parking lot cameras from their personal iPhones to check on their vehicles or determine if the area is safe before leaving (especially useful after-hours or for high-risk employees)? And aside from the convenience, I don’t think I need to tell you how valuable that feeling of safety is.

We though of a few more, some practical, some not. Now I’ll pass the question along to you: What would you do with the ability to view camera feeds on your iPhone?