Vantum made its debut at the NetWorld+Interop show by demonstrating
its new line of devices for serving up high-quality MPEG video over an
IP network.
The devices look like security cameras but come with a built-in
operating system, hard drive, 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet card and audio
inputs. Video is captured and encoded into the MPEG format right on the
device. It then is streamed out and/or recorded onto the built-in hard
drive. Both live and on-demand video served from the device can be
viewed with any standards-based video player, including Cisco IPTV and
Apple QuickTime. Vantum also offers a plug-in for viewing video
directly from a Web page.
"We want to make this device as easy to use for corporate users as
an auto-focus projector," says Howdy Pierce, Vantum's president and
CEO. "All viewing and configuration functions can be accomplished via a
Web browser."
Pierce says the "secret sauce" of the device is its programming
language that is built on ECMAScript (the standardized version of
JavaScript). An included development environment enables administrators
to build applications for the camera with predefined functions, such as
"on motion detection, begin recording."
Security is the most obvious use of the device. It can serve 30
frame/sec of live video while recording a 1 frame/sec video for archive
purposes. But Pierce sees a use for ad hoc corporate communications. "A
person can go into a conference room and as soon as the lights come on,
the camera records everything, so there's automatically a record of
every meeting for people to review later," Pierce says.
Vantum's four devices - the C1, C1d, M1 and M1d - will be available
in about a month. The C series includes a built-in camera, and the C1d
has on-board storage. The M series is for companies with existing
analog cameras. Pricing ranges from $1,295 to $1,995.
