Amcest launches dealer program with Cernium’s CheckVideo

ROSELLE, N.J.—Verification continues to be the buzzword in the monitoring business. The latest to address video verification of alarms is Amcest, which has announced a new Video Augmented Alarm Response dealer program, fueled by Cernium's CheckVideo video analytics product. Targeted at commercial applications, the new program will allow Amcest dealers to upgrade and begin offering verified intrusion alarms; and anyone wishing to newly become an authorized VAAR dealer can do so without any minimum initial or ongoing purchase requirements. Additionally, new VAAR dealers would get access to local and national leads from Amcest.

According to Cernium CEO Craig Chambers, CheckVideo improves the way central stations monitor and verify alarms by performing real-time analysis of monitored video and presenting critical visual information to security monitoring personnel in order to provide immediate verification and quicker and more accurate response. “The news from ISC this year was that verified alarms—and specifically video verified—were pretty significant themes for several of the seminars and group sessions, in addition to a lot of the products being demonstrated,” Chambers said. “CheckVideo addresses many of the concerns associated with both of the components of verification. One of them is simply being able to verify conventional alarms—smoke, water, glass break, those kinds of things—using the video component and reducing the number of actions that need to be taken as a result of those alarms. And the other is the video as a sensor itself, and that's one of the fastest growing components of alarm monitoring. The economics are really just becoming apparent to the industry.”

Amcest vice president Fred Rosenfeld said the VAAR program uses technology to revolutionize how intrusion alarms are handled and will allow Amcest dealers to affordably differentiate. “When my dad and his partners started, they did video monitoring with the only company out there at the time, this company called Robot—you had this big black box and you had one camera going out—and we'd get the alarm and we'd call the police and all the responsible people on the call list before we ever got the image constructed. But that was video monitoring circa 1976,” Rosenfeld said. “We found that simple motion detection was often mistaken for video intelligence. CheckVideo provides us true analytics at a price point we simply did not find in any other system … This is an enhanced version of enhanced call verification. We've been dispatching blind. No longer.”

With CheckVideo, central station operators are alerted to specific events, such as the presence of people or vehicles at specific times and locations, helping them to differentiate between false alarms and events of interest. The solution also integrates with alarm panels to permit sensor-based alarm verification.

Rosenfeld said the CheckVideo solution was a good fit because it delivered on its promise, something analytics has not always done. “We did both a technical and business analysis of the various systems known to us before ultimately settling on Cernium,” Rosenfeld said. “The CheckVideo system performed flawlessly. It did exactly what they said it would do.”