Milestone Systems on Monday announced the launch of XProtect Rapid REVIEW, a new add-on feature for the company’s popular XProtect video management platform that will enable users to review surveillance footage more quickly and efficiently. The feature, which leverages the video synopsis technology pioneered by BriefCam, means that end-users will be able to condense hours of video into just minutes and thus help organizations streamline investigation of security incidents.
According to Keven Marier, Vice President of Technology Partners at Milestone Systems, the introduction of Rapid REVIEW puts a vital analytic tool within reach of a greater number of surveillance end-users.
“We’re looking to accelerate the use of forensic analytics with our customers,” Marier explains. “Small- to medium-sized businesses, those with under 200 cameras, they don’t typically have someone sitting there in front of a monitor watching a set of cameras. The live workflows have not proven to be successfully used in the market and they come at quite an expense of hardware and software, so they’ve never been able to address the mass market – the millions and millions of devices that are out there connected to smaller sites.”
Additionally, Marier says the debut of Rapid REVIEW also broadens the availability of the BriefCam solution, which was originally developed as a product for the high-end surveillance market, to a larger number of businesses given the large existing install base of XProtect around the world.
“With our 30,000 resellers, we have an enormous reach around the globe and to be able to put that add-on product into our portfolio gives us a huge opportunity to reach our end customers through our resellers and distributors,” Marier says. “We are really focused on being able to address the mass market, to be able to do it in the right use case, which is forensic, post-recording and then to make it very usable where customers, right inside the Smart Client, can actually within minutes, very intuitively start extracting some really advanced analytics. Being able to review hours of video in minutes is such a time saver for this particular segment.”
To accomplish this, Marier says they knew the feature had to be an add-on product so users could access it from the XProtect Smart Client without having to upgrade any their existing equipment, pricing needed to budget friendly for customers to scale as necessary, and it also had to follow Milestone business rules with regards to customer flexibility. If an organization wanted to buy BriefCam as a standalone product, for example, Marier says the minimum starting point is 50 channels, which is simply not feasible for many end-users.
“We would allow a customer to add the right number of devices – we would recommend that they add the same number of cameras and the same number of channels for Rapid REVIEW – but we gave them some flexibility on our business rules and those business rules have proven to be critical to scaling Milestone’s business,” he adds. There are some business rules that [BriefCam] has implemented to segment the market in a way that they wanted to address, which leaves a ton of opportunity for addressing the market that they are not addressing, which we think is the bigger market.”
While both surveillance hardware and software companies have tried to develop viable analytic solutions for the mass market, Marier says most of them have suffered from either a lack of accuracy or power in the technology or the model they used just simply wasn’t mature enough for the industry.
“What this technology has done is focused on: how do we make it usable; how do we make it with the right level of metadata extraction or understanding, meanings forensics, and how do we minimize the alert fatigue that happens with live video, and then being able to use that for advanced compute that improves the usability and accuracy of the analytics,” he says. “We think the time is now that we can address this market.”
Marier emphasized that Milestone’s development of this offering with BriefCam, both of which share the same parent company in Canon, does not mean they are changing their approach to the market with their partners or their open platform technology.
“We have been synonymous with being a non-proprietary, open, end-to-end platform company for the past 20 years and we will continue to do that,” he adds. “What is the natural progression of that is we have built such a great community of technology partners that some of those have really matured, and we want to bring those to the next level from a scale standpoint. But we will continue to invest and prioritize our open platform approach and we have a lot of technology partners that make analytics and… this should not be seen as competing with those companies because it is such a novel and patented technology from BriefCam – this video synopsis piece – because it is not available from anybody else because they own the patent. We are intentionally not going after live-viewing and not doing the other pieces that would be much more overlapping to our other technology partners.”
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
