How It Works

You don't need this page to use the product — but if you're the person your organisation asks "where does the footage actually go?", this is for you.

The shape of the system

Cameras ──(local network)──► Edge Processor ──(encrypted upload)──► Cloud storage (your region)
                                   │
                                   └─────(live streams)────► Your browser

Four parts:

1. Your cameras — ordinary IP cameras on your local network. They talk only to the Edge Processor; they never need internet access themselves.
2. The Edge Processor — the appliance at your facility. It pulls each camera's stream, records clips locally, serves live video, runs on-device AI, and uploads everything to the cloud.
3. Cloud storage — your recordings, timelapse imagery, and metadata, encrypted in transit and stored in the storage region you choose.
4. Performance Hub — the management plane and the viewer. Device claiming, camera configuration, settings, sharing, and the entire CCTV interface live here.

The guiding principle: video is processed at your facility; the cloud stores, serves, and manages.

From camera to recording

The Edge Processor connects to each camera over your local network and pulls its native video stream:

• No re-encoding when it isn't needed. Standard camera video (H.264 and H.265/HEVC) is recorded as-is — full native resolution and frame rate, with no generational quality loss. Cameras producing other formats are converted on the appliance's hardware encoder automatically.
• Recording happens on the appliance first. Clips are written to the appliance's local storage as they happen, then uploaded — so a cloud hiccup never causes a gap in recording.
• Each camera records in motion-triggered or continuous mode, with pre-roll and post-roll so you never miss the lead-up to an event. Details in Recording.

From recording to cloud

An upload service on the appliance continuously drains finished recordings to cloud storage:

• Uploads are chunked and resumable — a large clip interrupted mid-transfer resumes from where it stopped rather than starting over.
• Every clip is uploaded with its thumbnail and animated preview, so the Recordings browser is fast.
• Uploads are encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and land in your facility's chosen storage region.
• The header of the CCTV module shows the live upload state at all times: "ITEMS QUEUED", "UPLOAD SPEED", and "UPLOAD STATUS" (IDLE, UPLOADING, or PAUSED).

Uploads automatically pause while you watch live streams to give live video the bandwidth, and resume a few minutes after you stop watching — the UI notes: "Uploads automatically pause when viewing live streams, and will automatically resume a few minutes after closing live streams".

How live view reaches your browser

Live view does not round-trip through cloud storage — you watch the appliance directly:

• Your browser negotiates a direct peer-to-peer stream (WebRTC) with the appliance. On the same network this is effectively instant; remotely it works whenever a peer-to-peer path can be established.
• If a direct connection can't be established within a few seconds, the player falls back automatically to a buffered streaming mode. You never choose — the player just works.
• Each camera is served at multiple quality levels (240p up to native), and the Auto quality setting picks the right one for your measured connection speed. See Live view.

If the internet goes out

• Recording continues. Clips keep writing to the appliance's local storage.
• Uploads queue. When connectivity returns, the appliance catches up automatically — the header's "ITEMS QUEUED" count drains back down.
• Local live view keeps working from inside the facility network.
• The appliance manages its own disk: if a long outage fills local storage, the oldest already-uploaded files are cleared first to keep recording.

If the appliance goes out

Footage already uploaded is safe in the cloud and stays viewable in Performance Hub. The gap is only the footage that hadn't uploaded yet. Devices report health continuously — see Device health & monitoring for how offline devices are surfaced.

Updates

The appliance updates itself from the cloud during a nightly maintenance window (roughly 1–3 AM local facility time) — updates are downloaded in the background and applied inside the window, and the health beacon stays online throughout so the device doesn't appear to vanish. Outside the window, updates stay locked. No action is needed from you.

Glossary

Related pages

• The hardware
• Recording
• Security & privacy — the same ground, organised as a security review
• Device health & monitoring