IP communications is changing just about every area of our lives, offering up new opportunities and ways to conduct business. One of those opportunities is using video surveillance more frequently and in more ways.
We tend to think of video surveillance in terms of basic building security, but IP video has made video surveillance much more cost-effective and thereby a technology that can be applied in many situations.
Using IP video at the point-of-sale (POS) is one way that video can be leveraged above and beyond just physical site security.
Video can be linked to particular transactions based on the time of the transaction, providing visual confirmation of every sale, for instance.
In terms of POS, IP video also can serve to monitor returns or exchanges, and to prevent theft. Further, it can serve as a form of people management, providing visual evidence of a questionable situation. No more “he said, she said” situations.
Video also can be used for access control. Even when a building has scanned security cards, it usually is possible for tailgaters to trail an employee and gain unauthorized entry. If there is a video camera on the point of entry, however, this can be avoided.
IP video also can be put to good use for building management. Video monitoring can help with energy savings, for instance, by using motion detection systems to trigger lighting, heating and cooling systems to turn off or on when an area is vacant.
Likewise, it is possible to use video to trigger an alarm when there is an equipment failure. An alarm can be sent with a video showing the perceived failure, which can help verify that action needs to be taken to correct the failure, and to assess what type of action needs to be taken.
Another use for IP video now that is so easy to set up is to use it for control systems. When systems go wrong, they sometimes can go horribly wrong. With video surveillance, however, businesses can learn from mistakes and breakdowns and better create protocols for the future that will eliminate such issues.
While mistakes and problems will happen, the key is learning from those mistakes and situations. Video surveillance makes it much easier to identify and learn from tragedies and crisis.
There are more uses for IP video, too. Now that the technology is relatively cheap and easy to use -- and ever-present thanks to the Internet of things and cellular communications — innovators are coming up with many new uses for the technology.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson