Camcloud Product Release Round-up: Summer 2024

This has been a jammed-pack summer filled with many important product updates to the Camcloud platform — some changes are large and impact our entire platform, while others are smaller but enormously useful productivity improvements. So as we say goodbye to the Summer of 2024, we’ve summarized all the major platform updates all in one post. Read on and contact us with any questions!

Camera Support and Video Streaming Enhancements

As an open camera platform, this is our bread and butter. We continue to invest in our market-leading plug-and-play camera integrations as well as the latest in streaming and video technology. 

Low Latency Streaming

We’ve made a major upgrade to our infrastructure to reduce video latency (delay) when streaming video from the cloud. What does this mean for you? The latency on your video streams will be as close to real time as possible for a cloud platform, leading to more responsive PTZ experience and real time views of your video. If you are using our web Timeline for regular live viewing and pan-tilt applications, we encourage you to give this a try! Contact us and we will make sure you cameras are using the new low latency infrastructure. This new improvement will be rolled-out to the mobile apps this fall. 

Camera Health Check (CHC) Upgrades

Based on customer feedback, we continue to optimize our CHC service so that it’s delivering accurate and timely reports on the health of your cameras. We have made numerous robustness changes and in particular, important changes to the frequency and sensitivity to our Continuous Recording Health Check. This test will inform you if a particular camera has bandwidth or intermittent connectivity issues. Very important! We encourage you to read more about CHC and ensure you are subscribed to CHC alerts for all your cameras.

Support for Cameras that are Compatible with Open Standards

Cameras that support open standards can now be added to Camcloud. Instead of adding a “Generic” camera you can now add a camera as an open standards type if the camera supports it. This allows extra configuration such as resolution, frame rate and PTZ controls. This will ensure much faster and efficient camera deployments while ensuring the settings are optimized for the cloud.

Cloud AI Upgrades

We continue to enhance and fine-tune our Cloud AI capabilities to ensure they are optimized for our customers. This summer, we have upgraded the underlying AI engine and analysis capabilities, while optimizing and tuning it specifically for people, vehicle and animal detection. Many secondary object detections (e.g. handbag) have become less of a focus based on customer feedback. We encourage you to try our Cloud AI to see if it helps make your review of video more efficient and alert notifications more impactful. The feedback from our customer testing so far has been very positive! 

Updated Cloud AI shows detection of two people and a one vehicle using a camera positioned three stories up and at a distance.

Usability Improvements

We continue to make smaller usability improvements to the platform to try and improve common workflows used in our platform. Let us know if there are other improvements you want to see!

Add User Setting

A small but useful new enhancement has been made to the Add User form. Now, you can automatically enroll users into notifications with their default email. This will speed setup of a large number of users, avoiding having to go into the Notifications settings after the user is created. 

Reseller Billing Management

For resellers of the Camcloud platform, you’ll see a number of nice improvements in our Billing History pages. Managing your Payment Methods, generating Statements, and other functionality have all been improved so that doing business with us is even easier. 

Public API

Do you have an application that you want integrated with Camcloud? If so, our rich set of Public APIs are available for you to integrate video, event and other features right into your application. We are always making improvements and adding new functions, and this summer was no different. Example use cases would be retrieving a live or saved video stream into your application for playback; another common scenario is sending custom events into our platform so they are searchable alongside the corresponding video. Want to learn more? Book a time with our solutions specialist and we can discuss your application. 

Want to learn more about any of these features and how Camcloud can help meet your needs? Contact us anytime and we’d be glad to discuss your requirements with you.