Video alarm verification adds a visual component to alarms, giving homeowners, monitoring stations and law enforcement visual verification of what’s going on. While this gives peace of mind for users, it also has an additional benefit: providing value to alarm dealers and installers.
Video alarm verification adds a visual component to alarms, giving homeowners, monitoring stations and law enforcement visual verification of what’s going on. While this gives peace of mind for users, it also has an additional benefit: providing value to alarm dealers and installers.
Alarm distribution differs by region. In EMEA, vendors primarily sell their products to distributors who then sell to installers, and buyers usually pay an upfront fee to get their systems. In the U.S., alarms are mostly acquired from alarm dealers who mostly work with a recurring monthly revenue model. In most cases the installer/dealer has a partnering monitoring station that they connect the user to. Sometimes they ask the user to choose a monitoring station.
What video verification does is providing an additional value to the dealer’s offerings, giving them an opportunity to upsell to customers. “When the detector triggers an alarm, the camera automatically records and transfers the images of the incident. A significant benefit for end-users is that the images can be sent to their mobile phone or tablet. As we can see, video-verified alarms are certainly a valuable addition to an alarm dealer’s service as a result of the advantages on offer to consumers,” said Mark Thomson, Marketing Leader for Residential for EMEA at Security and Fire under
Honeywell Home and Building Technologies.
“Alarm dealers can come with an offer that is more competitive. If the competition doesn’t have it they can say look, my system can give you more. The competition gives you alarm but I can give you verification and peace of mind. The solution that we give them is more attractive to the end user, so they can win more projects,” said Avi Krainer, VP for Product Marketing at
RISCO Group.
Video alarm verification installation tips
Since video alarm verification involves alarms as well as cameras, installation can be a bit more complex. “It is very important to install cameras along an anticipated path of an intruder, so that even if an intruder is moving from place to place, he will still be noticed,” Krainer said. “And it’s important to configure the triggers properly, so every detector will trigger the right camera.”
Privacy is another issue. “Perhaps the biggest challenge that end-users face is that they are unable to install a camera wherever they like. If, for instance, we were talking about a motion sensor, it can be implemented anywhere within a home. Privacy is much less of an issue. However, the same cannot be said for cameras. They can only realistically be installed in certain areas of the property,” said Thomson.
Allowing the user to control what others can or can’t see, therefore, is important. “For our solution … the video can be configured in full privacy mode where no audio or video is available. But should an alarm occur, remote operates can immediately access the feeds and communicate to site,” said Ross Wilks, Product Marketing Manager at
Vanderbilt Industries.
“We offer the highest level of security and privacy of cameras – we added a layer of a “temporary security token” for viewing the cameras,” said Krainer. “There is also advanced interface for monitoring software applications with a special interface for privacy, allowing the end user to define who can view the cameras and under which circumstances.”