Video verification: a residential service?
By Leif Kothe
Updated Wed May 7, 2014
Video verification in the residential market—it was a topic that surfaced in some of the PPVAR panels I attended at TechSec, though the discussion had been picking up momentum well before that.
It really seemed to pick up last August, when Honeywell Security announced it was joining the membership ranks of PPVAR, a move that some saw as a sign of the “mainstreaming” of video verification.
That seemed to be the gist of Scott Harkins (president of Honeywell Security Products Americas) words in the prepared statement released at the time, in which he said Honeywell recognized that “video verification is an important product category as we look to the future of security.”
Harkins, who was a panelist at one of the PPVAR sessions at ISC West, for the most part reiterated that sense of optimism, saying there was indeed potential for video verification in the residential space. He did however add the caveat that, from Honeywell's perspective, bringing the technology into the mainstream had to be done in a way that keeps such systems affordable to a mass residential market.
Keith Jentoft, president at Videofied - RSI Video Technologies and an industry liaison for PPVAR, has given me some leads in recent weeks about a few monitoring companies that are striving to fulfill the vision put forth by Harkins (EMERgency24, based in Des Plaines, Ill., is one of a few he's mentioned).
In the days and weeks ahead, I plan to explore how some of these companies are taking video verification to a broader residential market, zeroing in on the strategies that have worked as well as the challenges.
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