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Solving Your Camera Live Streaming Problems With Mersoft

Providers of video security solutions for Smart Home and commercial markets are realizing the innovation and value that live streaming video can deliver. Some see live streaming as a strategic tool for their product line. A tool that will help them grow in an ever-changing digital world. Additionally, others rely on live streaming to enable new business models and areas of growth. While many opportunities and benefits exist, the technology is still young. As a result, you may be looking for solutions to your camera live streaming problems.

Whether in the Smart Home or Commercial security space, providers are looking to build out capabilities for live streaming video within their existing, or new, solutions. Each face their own set of challenges around implementation. Let’s be honest, challenges really mean pain (and sometimes suffering) for the developers solving them. In the live video streaming world, there is plenty of pain to go around.

Commercial Market

Commercial video security solutions are nothing new. There are a number of companies who have been successful with traditional video technology. They are now challenged with delivering live streaming video across a variety of new applications – web, mobile, and set-top applications – while leveraging their existing infrastructure.

Commercial Pain #1: Aging Technology

It can be painful to implement features for today’s market with yesterday’s technology. Options like RTSP and Adobe Flash were the go-to’s for developing Windows video clients back in the day. Now they have become a major source of pain and frustration for developers looking to implement new clients. Mersoft understands this, and provides a set of SDKs purpose-built to develop streaming video clients on today’s operating systems and devices. From Android to iOS, set-top boxes, smart TVs, and even web browsers, our SDK’s do the heavy lifting for you. We include starting one or multiple live streams on a client, sending and receiving alerts, seamless and reliable new device setup, and eliminate the pain around retrofitting RTSP or Adobe Flash applications for our clients.

Commercial Pain #2: Live Streaming is Too Slow for Mobile

Typical solutions that stream live video to mobile devices include a step for HTTPS Live Streaming (HLS) transcoding. This transcoding process can have a negative impact on streaming rates. As a result, it is not uncommon to see 8 to even 30 second latency added to the stream. Developers are challenged to create a variety of tactics and approaches to reduce latency that only ends up hurting the overall user experience of the video solution.

Mersoft Stream eases the pain of latency with WebRTC. It extracts the H.264 media frames directly from the RTSP stream and repackages them into WebRTC without transcoding. This means sub-second latency and more, highly satisfied users.

Commercial Pain #3: Port Forwarding Problems are a Constant Maintenance Headache

Any solution that provides remote access to cameras will likely require a VPN tunnel (Virtual Private Network). That’s because the common camera streaming technology is RTSP and it is not a secure protocol.  So, it must be “wrapped” in a VPN tunnel to be secure.  Also, the firewall that allows the connection of RTSP to the outside world needs to be configured to permit it.  That is accomplished with port forwarding.  Unfortunately, for the SMB market, most use remotely-monitored internet modems.  Every time those modems are reset, they lose their configuration and the security installer gets a call to fix it.  

Mersoft Stream solves this problem by converting the video to WebRTC. WebRTC is both secure and does not require port forwarding. No more truck rolls!

Smart Home Market

The market for Smart Home video solutions is relatively young. However, there are a number of providers doing extremely well in this space. Unfortunately, more and more are pained by the limitations of outdated technology they’ve leveraged, and are being challenged to meet the consumer demands as Smart Home sophistication increases.

Smart Home Pain #1: Big Brands Offering More and More Features

The Smart Home video space has a range of players from SMB companies to even more massive brands like Google and Amazon launching new security solutions. There is a constant escalation of product differentiation due to these companies reducing cost, adding new voice control features (Alexa, Google Assistant), and providing elegant and user-friendly applications. Both SMB development teams and incumbent security providers feel the pain of constantly integrating new features into their products. While those working with relatively inflexible commercial video platforms struggle even more.

The Mersoft Professional Services Team eases this pain. They provide a roadmap for building out an end-to-end WebRTC solution, developing a best-in-class user experience, and integrating voice assistants. Additionally, the cost-effective Mersoft Platform provides powerful features to support the road map.

Smart Home Pain #2: Commercial Streaming Options Limit to Mobile and HLS

Many Smart Home security providers use open source or third party commercial video solutions as their base platform. Due to the constant evolution of market expectations, Smart Home security providers are rushing to deliver low-latency video streams to a variety of different consumer device types. Unfortunately, they are limited by traditional HLS transcoding, which makes it nearly impossible to deliver a web client offered using most commercial video platforms.

As previously mentioned, we can eliminate this pain by removing HLS transcoding (and associated latency). Instead, Mersoft leverages WebRTC but makes it easy by providing SDKs purpose-built for web browser, mobile, set-top box, and Smart TV device applications.

Common Pain for Commercial and Smart Home Security Providers

Both Commercial and Smart Home security providers have unique pains around live video streaming. And, they do share one common ailment – camera OEM software. Many providers use the software provided by camera hardware OEMs for provisioning, configuration, and stream delivery within their larger video solution. It’s not uncommon to find camera OEMs that with great hardware and not so great software. They are hardware pros after all.

Lack of features and questionable security in the OEM software can be difficult for the video security provider. Sometimes, they end up investing their own resources to fill gaps within the OEM software.  Other times,  they simply live with a lack of features. Mersoft is a live video streaming and storage platform built for today’s best practices. It provides the full feature-set and high level of security required for long-term success. Success in both the Commercial and Smart Home security markets.

Pain while developing new, innovative video solutions is unavoidable. Fortunately, Mersoft is here to help alleviate yours. Talk with our Professional Services Team to learn more.

Join Mersoft at ISC West in Las Vegas April 9-12, 2019.

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