Visual Society

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, BY STEPHANIE SILK

The phrase “I can't be in two places at once” may be close to extinct. Now, with live video feeds through the Internet, it is possible to be at home and anywhere from a mountain top to the inside of a construction site.

Dotworkz-owned US Relay, San Diego, a remote IP video monitoring solutions provider, is gaining traction in the surveillance market for its management, hosting and maintainence abilities for live streaming video camera systems. William Ferris, president of Dotworkz Systems, says that for any company or market that wants to install simple network cameras and archive information without the hassle and upkeep of building an infrastructure with an onsite server, DVR or NVR, the right solution is a live feed.

Once a site installs a network-based camera, the video will feed back to US Relay, where two server farms transform the information and fortify the video stream into flash format, where the images become bigger, faster and available to a larger audience. “It takes network pressure off of the remote cameras,” Ferris says. “These cameras in the middle of nowhere have a shortage of bandwidth, so we take the burden off and it gives us and the end-user more to do with relatively simple devices.”

And the range of end-users is no short of eccentric. Included in the list are Utah's Park City Mountain Resort, the Gatorland Alligator Breeding Marsh in Orlando, San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) California Water Science Center and La Jolla Beach. All of these end-users came to US Relay, Ferris says, to approach a marketing initiative from a new angle.

These marketing ideas range anywhere from beach owners wanting its surfers to check the waves before making a trip to making it easier to explore a natural alligator preserve and catch the animal out of the water to booking a beach vacation based on what you see before you go to making sure that the mountain top that says it has 100 feet of snow actually does.

But security, as always, is an upside to keeping video on hand round-the-clock. The USGS California Water Science Center uses a live feed to open visibility to flood areas so that the public can log in to the camera and see if a river or stream near their house shows susceptibility to floods.

San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, a landmark filled with stores, restaurants and events, is currently under construction and under watch by anyone online. “Watching a construction site not only gives confidence to possible future customers that the project is being worked on, but in the case that anything is broken into, they can go back in the archive and look at what happened,” Ferris says. “This service works best for security when it is used on smaller installs where putting in an infrastructure doesn't make any sense. We are seeing a trend toward smaller businesses using smaller camera systems.”

Ferris says that the trend will grow rapidly in the next five years based on two things. One is the growing ability to get suitable camera presentation at low costs. “Professional presentations are important in business. You don't want one still-image [on your Web site] that doesn't refresh or give clarity. It gives a bad public image of the service you provide. Being able to zoom in and out and control the camera up, down, left and right drives traffic to Web sites and will equate traffic numbers into customers,” he says.

Ferris adds that moving forward, new generations of people, including younger groups more familiar with the Web, will not tolerate not having that kind of technology at their fingertips.

The other reason for trend growth is, naturally, the human nature of voyeurism. Ferris says it goes back to the phenomenon of when TV first came on the market — we like the ability to see what's going on in locations that we are not in.

So, which gets more hits — the site that shows a river that might flood and endanger nearby residents? Or the mundane buildup of a shopping center? “It's just about the flavor of the day,” Ferris says. The Internet is tying people together and tying together the lines of communication. But it never ceases to amaze us what the public watches.”

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© 2009 Penton Media Inc.

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