A Unique Approach to Intelligent Video

Intellivid offers a tightly integrated solution that potentially offers significantly greater value than today's leading DVRs/NVRs.

NOTE: Intellivd has been acquired by Tyco. A new special report analyzing the impact of the acquisition is available.

• For retail managers, the system merits immediate consideration.

• For security managers of primarily indoor facilities, the system merits monitoring for future use.

• For integrators seeking a significantly differentiated product, Intellivid is an ideal choice.

The review starts with a comparison to industry incumbents, reviews Intellivid’s offering and closes with an assessment of Intellivid’s risks.

Integrated versus Modular Systems

Understanding the difference between integrated and modular systems is critical to appreciating why Intlellivid could offer a more powerful solution than incumbents such as March or Milestone.

The dominant trend in video surveillance today is the open or modular system. Open systems are prized for their ability to mix and match components from different vendors and to integrate any number of systems. It offers flexibility and extensibility to start small and add in new functionalities.

The major drawback of open systems is they limit how powerful a system can be. The open system must be designed to be modular, having clear interfaces to allow other components to plug in.

When solutions are already good enough to meet customer’s needs, open systems provide the best choice because they don’t sacrifice performance yet provide much greater flexibility.

By contrast, when a solution is not good enough, customers generally obtain more value from an integrated system that maximizes the solution. For instance, the iPhone is so good is because its an integrated system. Despite its many restrictions on using 3rd party products, is widely regarded as the best phone available.

This is a well accepted tenet of technology strategy by Clayton Christensen.

Intellivid’s Advantages

Today’s IP/Video Analytic systems are not good enough yet to solve retailer’s problems. Most retailers have huge losses from boosters, internal theft, shoplifters, etc. Retailers have major areas where operational efficiencies could be improved. Video analytics still suffer from major problems in false alerting, usability and integration that prevent them from being a major financial factor in most retailers. Plugging in a variety of analytics that may not work well individually nor as a system is a recipe for serious problems.

Intellivid has unique potential to more effectively reduce loss and improve operational efficiencies through an integrated solution. While the major retail incumbents such as March, Milestone, Genetec and American Dynamics move to a more modular, open approach, Intellivid has focused on delivering an optimized, integrated solution for retailers. It would be quite difficult for others to mimic or match Intellivid’s offering due to the engineering challenges such a move would require.

Intellivid Functionalities

A common concern for retailers (and any organization with large footprints) is determining where people are moving or have moved throughout a facility. This can be critical for tracking a suspect or locating an individual. Intellivid uses analytics across cameras to predict the most likely camera an individual may be moving towards. A semi-automated process, the Intellivid system suggests likely cameras to the operator, allowing the operator to simply click on the individual to continue tracking. Intellivid can then generate a customized movie of the individual moving across a series of cameras, providing unprecedented speed and completeness in evidence processing.

Intellivid not only integrates analytics across cameras, it integrates the use of analytics across the system. This tight integration makes it easier for users to employee video analytics and more likely that they solve real cases.

As tracking suspects is a prime task of retail security, Intellivid’s unique ability to enhance this offers significant operational and financial benefits. Watching video to establish cases can take many hours to accomplish. Indeed, many investigations are abandoned simply because it is too difficult and complex to investigate. Intellivid cannot only reduce the amount of time per investigation but it can solve cases that would have otherwise been too difficult to solve.

Moreover, the same cross-camera analytics can be used to provide rich data sets for business intelligence purposes.

Let’s say you want to conduct a customer study to better understand the shopping experience of a certain target market. Built in to Intellivid, using the same cameras and system, operators can use Intellivid’s tracking to quickly trace and build an end-to-end movie of the customer’s experience. This is far cheaper than the traditional alternatives such as focus groups or installing dedicated customer tracking system.

Similarly, for employee review/training purposes, the same tracking can be used to quickly review and assess the activities of an employee. Determining whether an employee followed standard operating procedures or how an employee interacted with a customer across a store floor becomes a straightforward and solvable task. This could equally be used for tracking employees suspected of internal theft.

Finally, in addition to these unique attributes, Intellivid integrates a leading suite of video analytics for people counting, removed object detection, etc. While offering of these analytics have become commonplace, the quality of vendor’s offerings can differ significantly. Intellivid’s offerings can be expected in the top tier of performance as they have focused on multiple year in-house development of analytics for retail.

Intellivid Positioning/Pricing

Though Intellivid can be used as an overlay to existing DVRs/NVRs, most customers will maximize value using Intellivid as a fully integrated video management system that records, searches, alerts and analyzes video. Intellivid's per channel pricing ($750 per channel for an 8 channel edition available for purchase online) is at a significant premium to IP video management systems but in line with video analytic license charges. Since analytics are used and purchased on all Intellivid channels, the effective system price is likely $3,000 to $4,000 more per 16 channels (a significant but not outrageous amount).

Finally, Intellivid's ability to track across a facility and provide an optimized workflow for security investigators is significantly different than leading video management solutions and very hard for those solutions (given their architecture) to replicate.

What are the Risks?

If you are not interested in using analytics and simply want a basic recorder, Intellivid obviously is a poor choice. Many retailers, especially late adopters, will be fine with existing products. For them, Intellivid does not make sense. For everyone else, a few risks should be considered in evaluating Intellivid.

1. How well do Intellivid's more integrated analytics work?

The problems of basic video analytics are well documented. Given that Intellivid's analytics are harder, how well will they work in your environment? If they work poorly, that will eliminate the potential increased value. A careful assessment of its performance in your facilities is important.

2. Does Intellivid have all the basic video management functionalities needed?

Video management is a fairly mature field with dozens of functionalities required. Even relative 'newcomers' such as Milestone and Genetec have been building such features for 10 years. Intellivid is only 5 years old and is likely still finalizing the dozens of basic functionalities needed. You may find that certain must-have are not yet complete so review this carefully.

3. How difficult is it for a security organization to secure additional budget?

While certainly possible, anytime security requires additional funding, the allocation and approval process can be tricky and time consuming. Engaging store operations, IT and finance may identify new sources of funding but it can also create new barriers to closing the deal that would not be available if security was simply allocating existing budget dollars.

4. What do you do about your existing system?

If you are in the process of upgrading from first generation DVRs, justifying the cost of migrating to Intellivid can be feasible. However, if you have recently deployed a NVR or second generation DVR, the financial justification could be much more difficult. While you can technically overlay Intellivid to another video management system, the cost and complexity of doing so is often not feasible for organizations.

5. Will modular analytics that plug in to open NVR systems become as good as Intellivid’s solution?

At some point in the future, analytics will mature. The challenge here is that it is hard to tell when. I would not be surprised if maturity take another 5 to 10 years. Once maturity occurs, the benefits of open systems increase. Yet until that does, a system such as Intellivid might provide much greater results and savings than an open, less powerful system.

The Upside

Intellivid has a unique approach and has been developing the underlying technology for a number of years. As such, if the more advanced analytics do work and provide substantial value beyond point analytics, Intellivid could be poised to become a major player not only in retail but within 3 to 5 years other market segments with similar environment conditions.

Because of the differing architectural approach, none of the current leaders (March, Verint, etc) could match Intellivid on Intellivid's key differentiators. Intellivid reports that sales in the last 6 months have increased considerably. Normally, I would discount that as vendor hype but it is feasible that Intellivid has only recently closed the gap on fundamental functionalities and is now able to win head to head against the incumbents.

All in all, Intellivid's focus on building highly optimized integrated solutions could have a major, unrivaled, payout to the forward thinking security manager and integrator.