CES 2015 – what we learned from over 40 camera manufacturers

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ces

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is one of the world’s biggest gathering of consumer technology innovators. And when I say one of the biggest, I mean it’s really, really huge!

More than 160,000 people flew to Las Vegas this year to get some serious business done. Angelcam was there too, and I personally talked to over 40 camera manufacturers. I also spent some time talking to home automation platforms, because I was very curious to get to know how they will use cameras in 2015, but let’s leave this topic for another blog post;)

As CES is very focused on consumers, big players like Axis, Dahua, Hikvision or Tyco skipped the show completely, and others like Foscam, D-Link & ICRealtech/ICRealtime were just introducing home cameras and having private meetings.

To be honest, nothing interesting happened at CES in terms of hardware. But I found these 3 highlights you might find interesting as well.

CES WIFI/IP CAMERA HIGHLIGHTS

1) Sengled – now releasing smart lighting with IP camera including smartphone surveillance app with face recognition.

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2) Giroptic – 360° wifi camera with sd card for outdoor fun as well as home security when you replace your light bulb with it.

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3) Skybell – quite a few of such doorbells made their appearance at CES, this one was the most interesting piece. Pretty handy for the delivery and for just checking up on your home or your office frontdoor.

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THE BIGGEST LEARNING FROM CES 2015: P2P is getting very articulated within Asian manufacturers 

I was quite surprised when I entered the Asian Pavilion and started talking to Shenzhen manufacturers.

Almost half of them said they had just launched their P2P (peer-to-peer) with their own servers in US, Europe & China! Yet they hadn’t connected all of their camera types.

They have started with cameras that are intended to be used for homes, so we will see if they can scale it. None of these manufacturers have their own cloud storage yet, but some of them said it was going to change in the next 1 – 3 years.

This movement may also be caused by the fact that Chinese manufacturers are “not just camera cases & chips assemblers” any more, they started founding their own development departments.

The way I see it, this is one big step towards cloud becoming the new standard in the near future.

Just to name a few Asian exhibitors with P2P: Foscam & Fostar (btw. they are the same company), Tenvis, Wansview, Z-ben, Sopooda, CSST DIT & 10 others.

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Well, that’s pretty much it! Looking forward to bringing you more news from other upcoming events like ISC West, IFSEC and others.

Stay tuned!

PS: If you want to hear more about CES or just want to learn about angelcam partnerships, reach me at: kate@angelcam.com or add me on Skype: kate_pljaskovova

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We wish you a happy holidays!

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We know you must be busy with Christmas shopping these days, so let’s go straight to the point.

We wish you a happy holidays!

Honestly, we were really tempted to create something original. You know, some animated, maybe even interactive! A Christmas card on its own domain. All shiny and worth sharing, just like last year!

But then we thought: hey, what if we devote that time to working on our apps? Wouldn’t it be more useful for everyone?

We believe it was, over the next few weeks we’ll be launching three new apps! Time-lapse, cloud recording and one more.

However, we believe your 2014 has been at least as great as ours. Thank you for being with us, and let’s make 2015 even better!

Enjoy your holidays:)

Warm Regards,

Peter Ocasek & other 16 angels from Angelcam

Click2stream is becoming angelcam. Find out why

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Were you around when we founded Click2stream? If so, you might remember it all started with just one thing: the Live Streaming app.

Things have changed since then, and we are now running what we call the world’s first open appstore for security cameras.

One of the first smart applications you can try is Cloud Recording, which many of you were asking for. The app comes with a little surprise – unlike anyone else in the world, we decided to let you record 3 days worth of footage for free.

Try the Cloud Recording app now!

Click2stream was an amazing brand, tied closely to our very first app. But as we decided to help people make use of their network cameras in many different ways, we are changing our name to angelcam.

 

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Why?

For couple of reasons.

One of them is that we believe security cameras are meant to do much more than just watch what’s happening around them. That’s why we enable them to do a lot of other things
through our apps.

The second reason is much more poetic! In some cultures angels are told to be magical creatures. And, with all due respect to magic, we would like to be known for bringing it to small and medium businesses all around the world. Also, our platform and all apps run in cloud. And guess where angels live?

That’s right.

Last but not least, the new name reflects our values. Developing apps for video analysis is one powerful thing, especially if taken advantage of. We believe in certain values that would never allow us to develop apps that would harm someone or someone’s privacy. Angels wouldn’t do such thing either!

This is an exciting moment for us, so we could be talking about this whole rebranding thing for hours, but you know what? Check it out for yourself at www.angelcam.com and let us know what you think about our new name!

Or shoot shut me an e-mail: peter@angelcam.com.
Peter Ocasek, founder & CEO

Meet angelcam at British Machine Vision Conference 2014

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We will be at the British Machine Vision Conference – one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas organized by the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA).

To meet us there, e-mail Adam (adam@angelcam.com, @adamherout). Adam will be presenting research results related to traffic understanding titled “Automatic Camera Calibration for Traffic Understanding” – a soon-to-appear app available to our customers.

Adding IP cameras just got simpler. Way simpler.

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Today we’re launching a big update to our system that will make your lives much easier again.
Over the past couple weeks we’ve been hard at work perfecting a new, simpler way to add IP cameras. Today this system is finally ready to be launched live for all of you.

AXIS CAMERA OWNERS

If you want to add an Axis network camera, you no longer need its RTSP address. All you need is two number you’ll find printed in your camera packaging.
See the video:

As an official AXIS partner company we were able to implement their AHVS connection system and making click2stream the simplest online implementation of the OneClick connection system ever.
This also means that your camera will connect and work:
– without a static IP address
– without changing your firewall settings
– without opening ports on your router

Go ahead and try it.

 

OTHER CAMERA BRAND OWNERS

You’ll still need just the RTSP or MJPEG address of your camera and a few clicks to get your camera streaming. But now the whole process will be faster and stripped of a number of bottlenecks you’ve been encountering before.

Try our new add-camera process

 

How To Check What’s Wrong With Your Network Camera

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Getting your IP camera work well isn’t always easy. So today we’ll share with you a small trick we’ve learned. Chances are it’s nothing new to you, but we feel like a lot of our customers might benefits from us sharing it.

When will this trick come in handy:
– when you’re not sure whether your camera is streaming at all
– when you’re having trouble with your firewall

It’s all about the VLC player. Because VLC is not only good for playing movies. It can also show you your camera’s video and audio stream.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Download VLC (if you don’t have it already)

Just click here, download and install it on your computer.

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2) VERY IMPORTANT: Connect to a different network than your camera is connected to

Most often the issue with cameras not showing in click2stream is the firewall or internet router that doesn’t allow the stream to go outside of your network. That means you can see the stream as long as your computer is on the same network, but it can’t reach our servers because they are outside of your network.

Here’s what you need to do:
Take your laptop home (if your camera is running on your company’s premises) or to the work (if your camera is at the office). Or just go to your favorite cafe with WiFi. And do the next steps from there.
If you don’t have a laptop computer you can take with you anywhere, ask a friend living in a different building to use their computer. It won’t be more than 5 minutes (so you can grab a beer and watch a game afterwards together).

3) Open VLC

You probably guessed this one already 😀

4) Go to File > Open Network

Or press CTRL-N (or CMD-N if you’re using a Mac)

VLC Open Network

 

5) Enter your camera’s RTSP or HTTP stream address

Put it into the URL text field.

VLC rtsp address

 

6) OPTIONAL: Click on Open RTP/UDP Stream

Here you can setup a few finer points – like if you have a non-standard port in your firewall or router open for the camera. Usually, the port is 554, but as said, you might have a different one open.

VLC port settings

 

7) Click Open

8) Can you see your camera’s video and hear the audio?

If you can, your camera is working: High five someone close to you!

If it isn’t you know the issue is not with click2stream and you can fix the problem in your camera’s setup.

If it works in VLC, but not on click2stream, don’t panic! Our tech support team will surely be able to help you and make it work. So go to the website and contact them (in live chat or if they’re not available, just drop them an offline message and they’ll get back to you ASAP).

Hope this little trick works well for you.
If you have a trick or two of your own and would like to share them with other click2stream customers, please let us know at sales@click2stream.com

 

Deployed Soldiers Watch Kids Play Baseball Thanks To Network Camera Streaming

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Welcome to Clarksville, Tennessee a town of 150,000,  not even a full hour drive away from Nashville. And also home of a wonderful application of our technology at the local National Little League baseball field. 1379203_615361781847176_1276194550_n It all started when one coaching parent approached Danell Welch who runs the field. He got diagnosed with leukemia and couldn’t continue coaching the team where his kid plays. That’s devastating news for sure. But Welch didn’t just offer sympathy. “I thought ‘What could I do for this guy. What would I want to do if I were in his situation,” Welch recalled on our recent phone interview. “And I thought “I’d want to watch my kid play baseball.”. That’s something that could’ve been done. By installing 3 ACTA D83 network cameras facing the field and finding a way to stream the live video publicly. Welch called up the ex-coach as the first game was about to start saying “Sorry you wont’ be able to help with coaching today, but you know what? You’ll be there with us today. Turn on your computer and go to our website.“. And as he did, there was his child waving at the camera.

The idea caught on also with the community’s parents serving in the army overseas. “Turns out, there’s a lot of grandparents who live elsewhere, but want to watch the kids play, too,” adds Welch. But with parents deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq wanting to watch the games, finding a new streaming technology was necessary – they needed live video streaming that would work seamlessly not just on desktop computers, but smartphones and tablets as well. And video streaming publicly in high quality to Android and iPhone is what brought them to click2stream.com. “We had some issues at first to set it all up correctly, but the support team at click2stream was very helpful and now it all just works,” said Lee Ezell who helped out with the on-site installation and setup. 163648_158721054177920_6809908_n Bringing parents and grandparents closer to their kids by watching them play baseball – that’s something we hope to see more often in the ways people use click2stream in the future. “It’s something that’s great also for other teams who come to play here from elsewhere,” adds Welch. “If you’re a parent who is deployed overseas and you can still watch your kid play baseball back home… Man, you can’t put a price tag on that!”

Business Owners Required By Law To Set Up Camera Surveillance

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As reported by CBS New York, a newly approved law White Plains, New York will require some types of business to install and maintain security cameras on their premises. The new law proposed by White Plains Public Safety Commissioner David Chong applies “to businesses that sell alcohol, check cashing establishments, pawn shops, pharmacies and stores open between midnight and 4 a.m.” according to the news report.

Commissioner Chong was quoted as saying “What we want is we want is uniformity,” adding that “consistently clear video that is accessible is a key to solving crime.”

According to CBS New York violation of the law can lead to a jail sentence for up to 15 days and a fine of “maximum of $250 a day until cameras are installed and in operation.”

Although we are more in favor of non-binding encouragement of businesses to install network cameras and store their video securely in the cloud where robbers can’t steal it along with cash from the register – the easiest way to render the system ineffective – the experience of our current customers proves that there are substantial benefits to having a surveillance system in place in stores that fit the law’s target. And with suitable network cameras starting at $100, there’s reason to believe more communities will follow in White Plain’s footsteps soon.

For store owners concerned with risk of police seizing their recordings by police outside of legal reasons when investigating an incident, the Cloud-based solution provided by Click2Stream adds another effective layer of protection by removing the recording’s physical storage from the store’s location.

While public reaction to the new law is mixed, we are preparing a special offer for business owners residing in White Plains and other locales.

source: CBS New York

Do streaming network cameras and video analysis apps need a blog?

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Welcome to the official click2stream.com blog!

It’s quite obvious you realized that’s where you are, of course. So let’s talk about…well, about what we will talk about in this blog in the future and why you should subscribe to learn about new posts (or come back here often).

There are 2 main services that click2stream offers to you and those two are the topics we’ll be covering in the blog, too:

1) Streaming live video and audio from network cameras (or security cameras)

2) Computer vision and video analysis applications

Now, let’s talk a bit more about the two and why we’re excited about them.

 

Streaming live video and audio from network cameras (or security cameras)

If you’re one of our customers, you’ve most likely found us because you wanted to stream from your network camera and needed a simple, problem-free service that provides it with transparent pricing. Or at least that’s the feedback we’re receiving in our customer reviews, emails and live chat support.
This is the service we started with and we have expert knowledge of. That’s why it’s very reasonable of you to expect us to write blogs with tips and tricks on how to set up your camera stream, handle troubleshooting and also get to your fullest viewership potential if you’re streaming publicly. We’ll also cover topics like choosing the right camera for your needs and intriguing new developments on the camera market like this interesting 360 camera, or this very budget friendly click2stream compatible camera.

Computer vision and video analysis applications

A few months ago we’ve opened what today still is the first and only open app-store for video analysis applications.

We’re working hard on adding more and more advanced apps to its offering as well as recruiting hundreds of 3rd party developers to add their algorithms and apps. While we’re doing this, we often stumble across interesting developments on the frontiers of computer vision that point towards what you can expect from our app-store in the future. It would be a shame if we didn’t share these with you.

Another range of topics come directly from you, our thousands of customers.
We often talk to you and in those talks often uncover new use cases for video analysis apps be it in retail, facility management, traffic, security or a handful of other areas. We would never have thought of these use cases without you and your expert knowledge of your own business and its needs, of course. But we think there’s value in sharing these findings as we think that for instance what we learn about one mayor’s office needs installed can help other cities solving similar issues.
Of course we will never share any sensitive information or business data and whenever we write about any ideas that sprang from discussions with our customers we will obtain permission from them first.

Hope this post got you as excited about our blog as we are. If it did, please subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss a single posts ever.
We’re looking forward hearing back from you about our posts as well as any ideas for topics.

click2stream.com team

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