Common Questions
Quick answers, with links to the full pages.
The product
What is VSaaS, and how is this different from an NVR? Video Surveillance as a Service: the recorder at your site (the Edge Processor) is a managed appliance, and footage's home is the cloud rather than a hard drive. Compared with an NVR you lose the failure modes — full disks, dead drives, port-forwarding for remote access, firmware you must patch — and gain cloud retention policies, guest sharing, audit logs, and an appliance that updates itself. See Overview.
Do I need the AI features to use CCTV? No. CCTV is a complete surveillance product on its own. AI Insights & People is a separate feature that runs on top of it (and requires it) — and running without AI roughly doubles the camera capacity of your appliance. See The hardware.
Can footage leave my region? You choose one of 16 storage regions (or Auto). European facilities get an explicit warning if a selected region would take footage outside Europe.
Cameras
Will my existing cameras work? Almost certainly — any IP camera that produces a standard network stream (the norm for Hikvision, Dahua, TP-Link, and most others). You add it by stream URL and verify with the built-in Test Stream before committing. See Cameras & devices.
How many cameras can I run? Per appliance at 1080p: 8 / 12 / 24 with AI on the three tiers, roughly double that for record-only. Facilities can run multiple Edge Processors. See The hardware.
Do my cameras need internet access? No — cameras talk only to the Edge Processor on your local network. That's a security feature: your cameras have no cloud exposure at all.
What resolution is recorded? Whatever the camera produces — standard camera video is stored as-is, with no re-encoding. See Recording.
Recording and storage
Motion or continuous — which should I use? Motion-triggered (the default) for most cameras; continuous where policy demands unbroken coverage. Continuous stores roughly an order of magnitude more, and storage is billed by the GB. See Recording.
How long is footage kept? Your choice: recordings 1 week–6 months (default 1 month), timelapse up to forever (default 6 months), AI metadata up to forever (default 2 years). Retained clips never expire. See Storage & retention.
What does it cost? Billing is usage-based: cloud storage by footprint, plus a per-active-camera component (cameras that produced footage in the last 30 days). Current rates are shown in the Performance Hub Billing & Cost Management section, and the Settings storage breakdown shows a live estimate. See Storage & retention.
What happens if the internet goes down? Recording continues on the appliance's local storage; uploads queue and catch up automatically when the connection returns. See How it works.
Can I recover footage after it expired? No — retention deletion is permanent. That's why incident footage should be retained immediately (the timelapse archive, with its longer retention, is sometimes a fallback for seeing a scene). See Retain & archive.
Watching and sharing
Can I watch from home / on my phone? Yes — the module works wherever Performance Hub does. Live streams connect peer-to-peer where possible and fall back automatically, no VPN or port-forwarding involved. See Live view.
How do I give footage to the police or my insurer? Create a share link: pick the sections, pick an expiry (1 hour to 1 month), send by SMS or copy the link. No account needed on their side; every viewing session is logged. Retain the relevant clips first.
Can a guest see who people are? No. Guest links never expose people data — names, matches, or analytics — regardless of what the facility has enabled.
Who at my organisation can see footage? Facility managers and administrators, per facility. Member-level accounts have no CCTV access. See Access control & permissions.
The appliance
Do I need to maintain the Edge Processor? No — it arrives pre-imaged, updates itself in a nightly window (~1–3 AM local), and reports its own health. Your job is power, Ethernet, and airflow. See Device health & monitoring.
What if the appliance is stolen or destroyed? Everything already uploaded is safe in the cloud — you lose at most the recent footage still queued for upload. A replacement appliance is claimed the same way as the original. Place the unit in a staff-only area.
Can I build integrations on this? Yes — via MCP, ideally through the AI Agent appliance for real-time, event-driven integrations (after-hours alerts, daily digests, fleet monitoring). See Integrations & MCP.