Verkada announces low-latency RTSP streaming

At Verkada, we’ve been focused on helping our customers expand the value they get from our cameras with data sharing capabilities that address key use cases that are vital to their organization's safety. Through Verkada Command, customers can leverage our robust video sharing features to share live and historical video feeds and safely grant access to external users. Using our rich set of APIs, customers can pull Verkada alerts into other systems, visualize data in custom dashboards, and build custom automation workflows.

To provide our customers even more ways to unlock value for their systems, we are excited to announce support for Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) across all cameras. With RTSP, customers can now stream footage from Verkada cameras to third party applications to support custom analytics, integrate with RTSP media players, or tie additional camera feeds into a central Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). While RTSP video streams are supported across all Verkada camera models, RTSP with audio is not available on our D-Series, Bullet Series, or CM41-S cameras. 

Key Use Cases

Connecting to 3rd party analytics applications

Verkada offers many powerful video analytics capabilities, such as People and Vehicle Search, Attributes Search, and Occupancy Trends. An RTSP feed will allow our customers to use 3rd party analytics packages, such as those used for retail analytics, shrinkage prevention, and crowd monitoring. 

Streaming footage into existing infrastructure

Larger customers with multiple sites often have pre-existing camera deployments, sometimes from different providers, which stream into centralized security locations. Some customers have asked us to provide a bridge solution as they fully transition over to Verkada. RTSP allows users at a Verkada site to use Command and take full advantage of our integrated platform, while users at non-Verkada sites can access Verkada video from within their existing infrastructure. 

Getting Started with RTSP

Site Admins can easily configure RTSP streams for a single camera in “Camera Settings” or in bulk from the “Devices” tab in Command. Verkada camera RTSP streams can only be accessed over the local network and the video streams directly from the camera to the client, not through the Verkada Cloud. All cameras support two RTSP streams; a standard-quality stream and a high-quality stream. The resolution and bitrate of the RTSP streams are the same as the Verkada native streams (see default Verkada stream resolutions and bitrates here) and cannot be modified.

A Verkada camera with RTSP enabled can stream footage in parallel to multiple clients, and therefore support multiple different use cases. In order to prevent unauthorized access to camera feeds and protect user privacy, RTSP streams are secured with username and password credentials that must be set when RTSP is enabled. 

For your convenience, the RTSP URLs are displayed in Verkada Command, allowing the user to copy and paste them with one click. You will have to replace the [PASSWORD] text in the URL with the password that you set-up for the camera, before using it in the RTSP client. 

Security of your password is extremely important in managing RTSP streams. Please be aware that the password will be in plain text in the RTSP URL, and will be passed to the client as such, as per RTSP requirements. 

Learn More

To learn more about RTSP setup and consuming RTSP streams in an RTSP client, please refer to our Help Article.