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CCTV video surveillance has been available for years now. Ok, but now, with IP video surveillance technology, it’s not only about video surveillance; it’s about a whole new world. IP video surveillance technology will change our world. You don’t trust. Just read and you’ll understand how a relatively simple technology improvement (the switch from analog cameras to IP cameras) can make so much in our small world.

  To start with, i hate video surveillance. Everybody could feel it, the feeling of loosing privacy, loosing liberty. In our close future, cameras will be everywhere, subway, schools, restaurants, shops, streets, (home?). Even if in most case no one never watch them, you feel like observed. Security apparently has its price of liberty. The choice of balance between security and liberty is different for each of us; the thing is that security is always put in front by the mass, placing liberty behind. Consequences of our societies models.

Apparently CCTV video surveillance and IP video surveillance are all the same. Only in appearances. The difference between the two technologies is really simple but is a lot, lot more powerful that we could even imagine. Small differences can sometimes change a lot. A little like the butterfly effect. To explain this difference we’ll take a similar example. For decades now, the computer existed and was used, for many tasks. It is a really good instrument that can make us save a lot of time. Good. Now, we all know that the abilities of a computer are multiplicated when used in association with internet. A computer alone is really useless compared to an internet connected one. It is the same with IP video surveillance and CCTV video surveillance, while CCTV technology is isolated; IP technology is directly connected to the World Wide Web. IP technology is already a part of the World Wide Web when installed. IP cams can speak, exchange, communicate, negotiate, alert other computers, phones, devices. We use Messenger or Skype, they use HTTP, TCP, RTSP, FTP… They have their own ip address and can consequently be allocated an Internet address. Amazing, isn’t it? A camera is like an eye, and an eye is nothing without the brain. The brain of an IP camera is us and all the automated software able to send you SMS when motion detection is triggered, emails, videos. With any 3GPP cell phone you can check each and everyone of your IP cams just by typing rtsp://ip.adress.of.your.cam in your phone media player.

 This simple change, IP cam as a part of the World Wide Web, will modify our world as it was the only remaining wall between our needs to remotely watch and the ability to do it. Many working applications of IP cam system that we would have find out without experience have already been found. For example, the possibility to watch you holiday hotel in live instead of just watching photos (it’s not a possibility, as we said, it is already a working concept, for a reason that i still don’t really understand). Another example, the possibility to check the roads traffic to prevent yourself taking the car when it would be stupid.