Exploring the IoVT: A chat with Digital Barriers’ Fredrik Wallberg

LAS VEGAS – At ISC West this year Security Systems News had the opportunity to sit down and speak with several companies working to enhance the security industry, and one of those is Digital Barriers, a SaaS company providing video services optimized for low bandwidth and cellular.

SSN spoke with Digital Barriers Chief Marketing Officer Fredrik Wallberg who gave us insights into the company and their body of work for what he calls an Internet of Video Things (IoVT) company. This interview has been edited for length.

SSN: Tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and the products you have here this year.

Wallberg: I run marketing for Digital Barriers. The company itself is over 10 years old. It was basically a product that was born in the defense and government space. So, it's gone through rigorous testing, and now we're making it commercially viable for the public sector space. Essentially what we do is we enable real time video over cellular. So, being able to pull video over cellular, if you have remote cameras or congested cameras that are running on cellular, it's very difficult to pull that video over. We have a proprietary codec, TBI, that allows that video to be pulled over with near 0 latency, near 0 degradation of the video. It's optimized over cellular, it's been certified, It's FirstNet approved, it's gone through rigorous testing and it's somewhere between 50 and 90 percent bandwidth savings. So not only do we make it possible for you to pull the video over cellular, It's also a huge cost savings for people. So, we've seen that come into play, especially if there's of users of networks, etcetera. We're able to do that if there's specific incidences of what we would call temporary towers. For construction sites, for live events, anything that requires mobile. It's a perfect fit for what we do.”

(SSN: Here, Wallberg begins to discuss Digital Barriers products)

Wallberg: “So we have essentially four main products. The overarching thing that I would like for you to take away from today is that we do real time video over cellular, and we do that through a variety of different product sets. So, one we have what we call the EdgeVis video router that’s on an Intel Nook box. It has our proprietary codec technology inside of it, and that sits at the edge. It has analytics on it, and you can do PTZ controls. That's one that's really popular right now.”

(SSN: Other products in the Digital Barriers lineup including the video router EdgeVis, Bodyworn, its body camera, and a redeployable minicam which all operate on the CloudVis platform.)

SSN: Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with Milestone and Genetec?

Wallberg: “We have a VMS driver native integration with both of them. Both companies work in different areas. So, like with Genetec, we work very much in sort of the smart city deployments, we work in the retail space with them. With Milestone it tends to be more in the DOT space, and K through 12 education. So, it works out well just in terms of the spaces that they play, and we just try to be as agnostic as possible, but we have a have a strong relationship with both of them.”

SSN: Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?”

Wallberg: So one thing that I’ve been doing on our website is saying that we are an IoVT company, so a couple things around that. Internet of Things. The sensors all these places, IoT intelligence is really what some of our system integrators call us. We do video over it, so it's really a moniker that’s not popularized yet, but I'd like to start kind of working that in. One thing that’s a little bit unique about us, because we do the extreme amount of bandwidth savings, it's a very good story to the telcos [telecoms]. So, where we have, for lack of better term, a leg up on some of the folks in the physical security industry, is we are certified both with Vodafone in EMEA and AT&T in the United States and we can and we sell through the telcos. So, it's a win, win situation and it's a slightly different road to the end user than the traditional system security bar that you would see at an ISC West.

Digital Barriers is a UK-based company that is headquartered in Virginia, and soon to be opening an office in Dallas as well. You can learn more about their products online at digitalbarriers.com.