Are you Thinking of Launching your Own Video Surveillance Service? You Must Read this story
It is no secret to anyone that the video surveillance in the Cloud industry is constantly growing and that, in addition to attracting subscribers for its unique capabilities, it is generating high interest in public and private companies that are now seeking to develop new business models and launch a video surveillance service by subscription on the Internet.
In this article, we want to tell the story of how one of our clients, with our help, managed to launch a successful video surveillance service for its customers. We will talk about what problems they faced, what were the benefits, and why this customer chose our solution. At the request of our client, we will use a fictitious name to protect the business identity.
This company based in Moscow, which for the purpose of this article we will call “Good Telecom Operator”, has been working with Otter Video for several years now. This company hired Otter Video services to structure its OTT service before. In 2017, this client decided to launch a new service for its subscribers: video surveillance in the cloud.
At that time, we were developing Otter Video Watcher, a software to run video surveillance services, and naturally we decided to offer it to that particular client. In addition to us, as is very common, the client began to look at other proposals in the market and organized a bidding competition between suppliers of similar solutions. Unfortunately on that occasion we lost, obtaining a total of 75 competitive points out of 100 possible and remaining behind the winner by only 6 points.
After the licitation process was over, “Good Telecom Operator” acquired servers, software licenses from our competitors, hired engineers to provide the service and, at the end of 2017, officially launched a cloud video surveillance service for its subscribers.
We maintained communication with “Good Telecom Operator” and we learned that the launch of the service with the other provider cost around $50,000, of which $25,000 went for the purchase of equipment, $15,000 for the purchase of software and about $10,000, monthly, were necessary to hire and train system administrators, on whose shoulders rested the responsibility that everything should work as planned.
For approximately six months, the “Good Telecom” operator employed a Marketing Director, a Video Surveillance Manager, a Chief Engineer, and a couple of software developers. The system was designed to connect 600 CCTV cameras in the first stage. Naturally, the possibility of further expansion of the system was raised. Our partner took about 8 weeks to launch the video surveillance service.
Time passed and in 2018 we did not communicate at all with the telecommunications operator. However, at the end of that year our executive who had worked with this company previously decided to go to congratulate his company’s peers for the New Year and learned many intimacies of the launch. This information surprised everyone here at our office: The average price for a 2-week archive was $ 15 per camera per month. Even worse, they only had 20 subscribers, around 100 cameras connected, and the price of ach device was $150.
We were not surprised that the employee responsible for such results in “Good Telecom Operator” was preparing for an inevitable dismissal. We knew he was a good guy and we decided to get his bosses support and admiration again.
The next day we went to see him and his superiors for a second time. We understood immediately the reasons for such results and concluded that the cost resulting from the service for subscribers was the reason for the failure. This cost was not calculated at the stage of preparation of the project and nobody was ready for it. The video surveillance service of “Good Telecom Operator” assumed a monthly fee of $ 15 per camera per month for a 2-week archive in the cloud while the average market price was about 8 dollars.
Naturally, we were interested in what would happen if the service were relaunched with our software. At that time, we offered this company our server and presented a turnkey service, which included the use of our servers, maintenance and support, implementation of SLA, support and update of our software, brand of mobile applications and interface service web In general, our package offer included all turnkey equipment, the operator only had to deal with sales and marketing to actively attract subscribers.
In terms of price, we offer our partner a price of $4 per camera per month for the same 2 weeks of continuous archiving. At such cost, our partner could easily support the price level of $8 per month for the camera for 2 weeks archive.
After those 14 days, we considered that we were ready to reach our partner with a second offer and we scheduled another meeting. We proposed new conditions under which we provide all “turnkey” brand services with payment by connected subscribers. Therefore, the costs of the preparatory part of the project to launch a video surveillance service for our partner were reduced to almost zero. The project manager was beaming with joy when he saw us as an opportunity to look good in front of management after a failed attempt to launch a video surveillance service in the past.
The next day, we signed a contract and prepared our client for the installation of Otter Video Watcher in our cloud. The installation preparation process is automated, so it took less than 10 minutes to prepare Watcher for our client. Another two days were spent marking the mobile application in a separate order. The brand of the mobile application is the only direct cost incurred by our partner in the reworking of the project.
With our help, “Good Telecom operator” has begun to reintroduce the cloud video surveillance service in the market. The results soon arrived and were great.** Together we were able to reach the first hundred connected cameras in just 2 months of the launch and the number of subscribers continues to grow. When we take care of all the technical part, our partner only had to devote himself to marketing and increasing sales.
From this story, we have drawn several conclusions and we try to transmit them to those clients who wish to launch: It is very important at the stage of the idea to calculate the costs of the project of developing a new video surveillance service. As the case described showed, our partner could have saved $ 50,000 if he had initially decided to work with us.
The launch of a video surveillance service involves risks that someone has to assume or find a way to block those risks. That is why we recommend testing the idea of launching a subscription service with our turnkey solution. The success of the project to launch a video surveillance service does not depend on the amount of software functions, but on the quality of the commercial offer aimed at the market, which is based on the solution of basic tasks to play video from cameras, file playback and work with events.
By the way, we have included in the package of our turnkey video surveillance service also a complete billing for the convenience of agreements with subscribers, but that is another story that we will tell you in upcoming blog posts.
