Reducing Bandwidth Consumption of a Cloud Camera to 20kbps

Verkada have taken a different approach to unlock the benefits of the cloud without hindering bandwidth.

Unlike most cloud video security solutions, Verkada’s cameras were designed to store footage on an internal solid-state drive engineered to withstand a 10-year lifespan – storing 15-365 days of continuous video. Thus videos stream only when an authorised user requests live or recorded video.

In order to provide organisations with the best user experience, but still keep bandwidth limitations in mind, the Verkada team built an interface that operates on a camera’s “steady state”.

In this steady state, Verkada cameras send a constant metadata stream consisting of encrypted thumbnail images, related metadata (including analytics) to the cloud approximately once every 20 seconds using a bandwidth uplink of no more than 20 kbps per camera.

With a bandwidth footprint of 20 kbps per camera, an organisation can have over 100 cameras on the same connection (~ only 2mbps) in contrast with one traditional cloud camera which tend to stream at 1-2 mbps.

The thumbnail images uploaded from each camera in the steady state create a historical timeline view, which allows for time/date-based search, motion-based indexing, additional features, without the need to retrieve hours of history video.

While users can choose to stream a live feed or view recorded footage from any particular camera, this interface greatly reduces the amount of continuous video most users will need to stream for incident resolution.

More information here: Reducing Bandwidth Consumption of a Cloud Camera to 20kbps