What is Camera Management Software?

I’ve been working with IP cameras for nearly 5 years. From the early delight at getting a jpeg to refresh on a web page to the large scale cloud CCTV projects, it’s been a long learning experience.

All the while, Camba.tv and now Evercam have been pushing the frontier of what is possible with, or expected from, Cameras. We’ve worked on remote storage for thousands of cameras. We’ve built a beautiful API, timelapses, an app store and much more.

Then it struck me.

No one has yet solved the basic, most fundamental problem of working with cameras. Just the simple ability to login and view a camera with the sort of frictionless user experience that we are familiar with in other areas of our lives. For the most part, this experience, for the majority of people, is still broken.

So what do I want?

I want to login and see my cameras. I want to see the recorded video. I want to share my camera, or a recording with someone else. I want log files. I want to be alerted if my camera has gone offline or if something unexpected has happened (motion detection etc.). I want to be able to work with any type of camera and I don’t want to have to spend hours trying to understand the rules of port forwarding. I want to be relaxed knowing that my camera is not unwittingly exposed to strangers on the Internet and I want this to work on any device, mobile or desktop, that suits me.

Let’s call it Camera Management.

Somehow this reminds me of an advertisement for Honda that I really liked.

Evercam, it’s like writing on bananas for cameras.