Network Optix Takes Video Surveillance to the Next level The innovative platform brings streaming HD video to surveillance.
By Jennifer Wang •
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If Network Optix has its way, we're going to see more security cameras--and more employees acting poorly, like the viral YouTube video of a soon-to-be-unemployed FedEx worker delivering a computer monitor by hucking it over a fence. That's because in March, the Burbank, Calif.-based firm unveiled an enterprise video-surveillance platform that promises to leave the industry--and current streaming HD video capabilities--in the dust.
"The product does things none of the others can do," co-founder and CEO Nathan Wheeler declares. This includes streaming an unlimited number of high-definition videos simultaneously, with almost no delay; image recognition and tracking across different camera feeds; a search function that jumps to periods where movement is detected in a particular highlighted area; and real-time zoom and focus functions that can make, say, a fuzzy license-plate number legible.
Network Optix got its start in 2009, when Wheeler, a top salesman in the camera surveillance industry, was closing multimillion-dollar deals with Google and T-Mobile. It bugged him that he could watch CNN in high definition anywhere, such as his dentist's office, yet the majority of surveillance video was still of poor quality--"one-tenth the resolution it should be to monitor and capture perpetrators," he says. The problem, he realized, was bandwidth. "HD video is the biggest hog of bandwidth out there--Netflix uses up 17 percent of it alone," Wheeler explains.