We build the software that gets camera video out of one system and into another. State DOTs, cities, counties and utilities have been running it since 2006.
See the productsMost of the agencies we work with have a camera estate that accumulated rather than one that was planned. Different manufacturers, different generations, some of it on fibre and some of it on a cellular modem at the side of a road, and a video management system that was specified on the assumption that everyone watching would be in the building.
Replacing any of that is usually out of the question, and it is rarely necessary. The video is already there and it is already encoded. What is missing is a way to get it into a different codec, a different protocol or a different organisation without disturbing the system that is recording it. That is the work we do, and we have been doing only that for twenty years.
Our customers are overwhelmingly public sector, and the thing they are usually trying to achieve is central management of several sites with viewing from somewhere other than the control room. How that connection is made varies by customer and by what their security team will approve, which is why we do not sell one transport and call it the answer.
Two products do the heavy lifting, and they are always sold together. Everything else we make sits on top of them.
The transcoding and normalisation layer. Forge detects what a camera is actually sending rather than requiring an operator to declare it, which matters when the estate holds H.264, H.265, MJPEG, MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-2 from four different manufacturers. It takes in RTSP, RTMP, SRT, HLS, HTTP and multicast UDP, and puts out HLS and low-latency HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, SRT, MPEG-TS and multicast, with multi-bitrate ladders and several destinations from one decode.
It also does the processing work that makes a feed usable: deinterlacing, scaling, cropping, watermarks, timestamp overlays, audio channel mapping, packet loss reconstruction for impaired links, and a jitter buffer set per input rather than globally.
It runs as a hardware appliance, as a virtual machine on vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM, in Docker or Kubernetes, on AWS, Azure and GCP, or as a hybrid with transcoding at the edge and distribution in the cloud. Version 9 is current.
The distribution and sharing layer. Media Router is a proxy boundary, so an external viewer never reaches a camera, only an endpoint created for them. Each consuming organisation gets its own port, its own credentials, its own IP whitelist and its own set of cameras, and nothing outside that set is reachable.
It carries the same protocol range as Forge, emulates camera protocols so a receiving VMS believes it is talking to a camera it already supports, and authenticates per session with one-time passwords rather than shared static credentials. High availability is handled with VRRP.
Version 3.0 is current and holds PCI-DSS compliance with Qualys certification. A new release is due before the end of 2026.
A cloud video management system in the browser. Watch live Media Router streams, monitor the health of a Forge fleet frame by frame, and manage inventory, partners and access from one place. The full viewer arrived in 2024, and Crossroad is the successor to our video wall product.
Recording and long term retention, with quality tiering by age so older footage steps down in resolution instead of being deleted. Writes to NAS over CIFS or SMB, SAN over iSCSI, NFS, direct attached storage, and S3 compatible or Azure Blob cloud storage. Version 3.5 is current.
A viewer for operators. Up to twelve cameras at once in selectable layouts, a map to find a camera by location, and five permission tiers so a contractor, a duty officer and a system administrator do not see the same estate.
Motion detection, object counting, crowd analysis and plate reading as an add-on to Media Router. We have been working on computer vision since the days of HOG and SVM classifiers and background subtraction, and we still use the older approaches where they beat a model on a thin link.
Vehicle counting and classification, wrong-way detection, emergency vehicle alerts, parked vehicle detection, multi-camera tracking and plate recognition for DOTs and public safety. Everything it produces is an alert that sends a person to look, not a finding.
iOS and Android apps for people who are not at a desk. Live feeds, PTZ control, event alerts, and custom branding for agencies that hand the app to field staff or to the public.
A lot of what we sell is judged on how well it behaves with somebody else's software. Our Genetec Security Center integration uses the SDK natively rather than wrapping a plugin around it, and includes complete SDK passthrough with PTZ control. We work with Milestone XProtect, and we speak ONVIF for discovery, control and Profile G recording retrieval.
Where a receiving system cannot be changed at all, Media Router emulates a camera protocol it already supports, including ONVIF Profile S, Axis VAPIX, Panasonic and Sony VISCA. That is usually faster than getting a VMS vendor to add support for something.
Every one of those has the same underlying shape: several sites, a mixed estate, and a need to let another organisation see part of it. See solutions by industry.
Nine of our tools are free, with no account and no email required. Most of them started as something an engineer wrote to get through a deployment and then kept using. RTSP Stats and HLS Stats measure what is actually happening to a stream, including packet loss, jitter, clock drift and cache behaviour. LAN Camera Finder and SADP Probe find cameras on a network, including the ones whose IP configuration is wrong and which therefore answer nothing else. Camera Studio manages cameras over ONVIF with PTZ control and recording retrieval.
Some of the work goes further out than our own site. Our Media over QUIC support was contributed upstream to MediaMTX rather than kept in-house, our RTSP benchmark is open source, we published a license plate recognition model under a Creative Commons licence, and we produced the 2026 refresh build of Soduto, a free macOS client created and maintained by other people. See all of them on the tools page.
Twenty years produces a lot of documentation and we publish most of it rather than keeping it behind a sales call. Product manuals, API references, integration and deployment guides, and a technical library of engineering write-ups where we show the measurements rather than only the conclusions.
Documentation, downloads and the technical library.
An agency specifying a video platform is buying something that has to keep running after the people who signed for it have moved on, which makes our longevity part of what is being purchased. Customers ask about it directly and they are right to.
Our answer is the support record rather than a statement of intent. When we retire a product we keep patching it for years afterwards, and we name a successor instead of leaving customers to work out the migration themselves.
| Product | Retired | Feature support | Security patches | Successor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WINK Encoder | 2025 | 31 October 2026 | 31 December 2031 | WINK Forge |
| WINK Video Wall | 2025 | 31 October 2026 | 31 December 2031 | WINK Crossroad |
| Analog composite and S-Video encoders | 2021 | 2021 | Fall 2025 | HDMI and SDI encoders, then Forge |
Seven years of security patches on a product we have stopped selling costs us something, and it is the reason customers who bought in the early years are still with us, most of them on equipment they have never had to replace. We expect to be doing the same thing twenty years from now. The twentieth anniversary announcement goes through the history in more detail.
We would rather hear the problem than send a brochure, and if a dedicated box fits your case better than our software we will tell you that.
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