Three team for transit solution

HOUSTON, Texas—Safety Vision, Insight Video Net, and Pivot3, aided by Firetide, in November entered into a strategic alliance to provide a turnkey solution for digital mobile video aimed at the first responder, transit and public-safety sectors. Safety Vision will provide mobile-rated onboard cameras and DVRs; Insight brings video management and system health monitoring; Pivot3 will provide the storage back-end. A Firetide wireless environment allows the video to be viewed and stored in real-time. Safety Vision has always targeted the first-responder and transit markets, said Chris Fritz, director of technology and business development. As technology has progressed “to something that’s a lot more complicated and offers more features and flexibility,” he said, customers began asking, “How come my incident can’t be wirelessly transmitted?” So, rather than hosting all the video on the bus, say, this new solution brings the video back to a central location, using the Pivot3 storage, which “has a very unique solution for a RAID medium,” Fritz said, “where if you have a failure on one hard drive, you don’t lose data.” Pivot3 had already been working with mobile video environments, said vice president of marketing Jeff Bell with Insight, which has traditionally focused on the police and first-responder market. Bell said Pivot3’s scalability is well suited to these applications. Bell said Insight put Pivot3 in touch with Safety Vision, which had already been drawn to Insight’s software. “It’s very robust,” said Fritz, “able to catalog all of the video, all of the events, and everything that’s been entered by a supervisor into a standard SQL database. It’s very difficult to have all of these network components working together. You can’t just take a DVR off the shelf, find a wireless solution, and then mate that up to a server and integrate it.” Robert Carreon, president of Insight Video Net, said his work with the police in the past also gives new transit customers, for example, assurance that the video they collect can be used to prosecute criminals. “We know that it was taken right from the bus to the server and we know who’s touched it, who’s looked at it. We make sure this is evidence.”