Demand for video and improved resolution continues to increase in organizations
Beyond the core functionalities of recording and displaying video, one of the most important capabilities of modern Video Management Software platforms is the ability to reduce bandwidth required for transmitting live video. Using both optimized compression and bandwidth saving VMS technologies, remote and centralized viewing is becoming an industry-wide reality.
Bandwidth Throttling
Although not a true bandwidth saving technology, bandwidth throttling is a means to control the amount of data transmitted.
The VMS platform administrator is able to configure a limit to the amount of data transmitted from the VMS recording server to clients, typically configured in kilobits per second. It does nothing to modify or reduce the size of the data being transmitted, but instead simply prevents any amount of data over the configured limit to be streamed.
The feature allows administrators to accurately forecast the amount of data that could be consumed at a given time. This is most relevant when users of the VMS system may call up video remotely. Remote viewing would cause the video to be streamed over an internet connection, which may be shared by other network applications. Limited bandwidth availability may trigger a need to apportion available bandwidth in order to guarantee throughput for other uses.
One problem with bandwidth throttling for this use case is any user of the VMS platform would be affected by the limit that was set, not just remote users. If video were displayed on a separate client computer on the same LAN where sufficient bandwidth is available, the performance of local client viewing would be limited by this feature. To avoid local client performance issues, the configured bandwidth limit may need to be set too high to effectively prevent the demand for remote video viewing from consuming too much bandwidth over the internet connection.
When the configured limit is reached by a client, often some number of live camera feeds will freeze. If a relevant security event is occurring, this effect can cause monitoring professionals to miss the action, preventing a real-time response.
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