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8 Security Dealer & Integrator / www.SecurityInfoWatch.com February 2018 s part of SD&I;'s 40 th anniversary celebration in 2018, I thought it would be interesting to use this column to periodically look back at the tech- nologies and news that made headlines in the past. Here's a fast-rewind 15 years, all the way back to Feb. 2003. I bet you thought that video verifi- cation of alarms was relatively new… but it turns out the topic was cover-worthy way back then – cheesy artwork of a burglar coming out of what looks like a 20-year- old (at the time) IBM personal computer notwithstanding. Back in 2003, video alarm verification was a novel, basically futur- istic concept. e arti- cle cites a proposal in Los Angeles that called for non-response of alarms without ver- ification. is led to a policy in 2004, where each alarmed location within the city was afforded two false alarm activations within a rolling year; however, aer two false alarm activations, verification would be required in order to dispatch the call to a patrol unit. In response to the proposal, then-NBFAA vice president George Gunning posited that it would "take at least a year before enough guards could be trained to meet the demand a law like this would require." Gunning's alternative was CCTV – only the industry had to somehow figure out how to transmit surveillance images over POTS lines! False alarms, it seems, will always be an Achilles' heel for our industry; how- ever, when you fast-forward to today, as we know, video alarm verification has turned into a more ubiquitous feature – even for modern residen- tial security systems. But even with IP technology that has made send- ing video surveillance images to monitoring centers simple, video verification is still a new add-on for all kinds of security systems. ADT, for exam- ple, just introduced video alarm verifica- tion services specifi- cally designed for small and medium-sized businesses through its ADT Pulse system in December. e alarm event and video footage are sent to both a mon- itoring center and to the user's app. In the case of an actual event, dispatchers contact the author- ities and provide them with descrip- tions of the incident from the video. When it comes to today's home security systems – where false alarms are so out of control that some munic- ipalities are fining both the security company AND the home user for them – video verification is also taking a vastly increased role. "For us to be able to provide...visual information to a monitoring station so that the right information can be passed on to the authorities to help us catch a bad guy or deal with an emer- gency, we think that's a true selling benefit for dealers and a differentiator today," explains Gene LaNois, head of Nest's Professional Channel, which last year, became one of a group of compa- nies to partner with video verification provider I-View Now. Still, today – as it was 15 years ago – building awareness of the technolog- ical capabilities of video verification among end-users remains a challenge. "We really want to try to help create the awareness of how important video verification is," LaNois adds in a testi- monial on I-View Now's website. I-View Now is indeed spearheading that charge (as it should) – partnering with ADT, Nest, Honeywell, Eagle Eye, Bold Technologies, UTC and others. When an editor pulls up this column in year 2033, I bet he or she will won- der with amazement how this industry ever got by without every alarm – com- mercial, home or otherwise – being video-verified…even if the video is of a masked burglar guy and it is being sent to a dinosaur smartphone! ■ Video Verification: Cutting Edge 15 Years Later The technology may have been born in the days of CCTV and POTS lines, but its evolution continues today Editor's Note BY PAUL ROTHMAN Paul Rothman — Editor-in-Chief ■ While Security Dealer probably wasn't on the cutting edge of cover art design in 2003, it was one of the first magazines to tackle video verification. @SecurityDealer www.facebook.com/SDIMag www.SecurityInfoWatch.com/sdifast50 www.linkedin.com/ company/16179507 4 0 4 1 9 7 8 2 0 1 8 O F E X C E L L E N C E YEARS A