Came back from Vegas last night after exhibiting our new stuff at the World Gaming Protection show. WGP is attended by about 400 surveillance pros that are focused on catching cheaters at casinos. There were two full days of seminars on how to spot the cheaters and make sure they don’t come back.
This is a great audience for us, since their needs go way beyond the typical DVR recording/playback.
What they need is a video management system and tools to make the video really useful. So we showed new modules to manage surveillance assets across the extended casino, provide a framework to report incidents and archive the associated video. We also showed examples of video analytics and POS data integrated with our core recording technology.
There were some very cool technologies being shown by other small, nimble companies as well. There were some new video analytics tools for identifying playing cards and chips, and tracking their movement around the card table. There were new ways to count people and cars, recognize faces and match them to an “undesirables” database.
These are the kind of tools that surveillance managers are looking for. Casinos will need to pick and choose the best of each of these new technologies as the cheaters become more sophisticated.
At the same time, I heard grumbling about how the incumbent vendors haven’t taken to the idea of integrating tools and software from other companies. They want to keep their customers in the “walled garden”.
We’re betting that the ability to integrate tools from many different vendors is going trump the proprietary approach of the big surveillance system vendors sooner than later.
Karl Crabs
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