Steinfort says it was difficult for the company to manage about 600 video systems and to give relevant company officials access to the system.

Valuable information available in stored digital video concerning a store’s operations and consumers’ behaviors was largely lost, he says, when the video was stored in individual DVRs.

“With most businesses there is one IT person who knows what to do, and you ask them for [the video],” Steinfort adds. “[Companies] struggle through the interface.”

Steinfort provided QSR with a live demo of the Envysion system. The Web-portal window displays video in the center and a section on the left with a pull down menu allows the user to monitor any number of cameras, not unlike browsing file folders in Windows.

Video in the demonstration showed the recorded video of the action behind the POS system at a Chipotle restaurant. With a click, the video switched to what was happening behind the food counter. A fairly simple search tool allowed Steinfort to find recorded video for certain POS actions, like voids or particular menu purchases.

Aside from allowing managers to see if employees are misusing the POS to steal from the restaurant, the search tool can allow marketing professionals to see who is buying new menu items and if employees are making it properly or efficiently.

This Web-only approach differs significantly from how EYESthere operates its digital video service. Andrews says that EYESthere sets up clients with a Web-connected DVR, but does not require clients to access their video via a Web portal. The EYESthere system can access up to 500 DVRs and 96 camera views at once, Andrews says.

“We allow clients to interact directly with their DVR via a Web browser,” Andrews says. “The vast majority just interface with the DVR independent of us.

“EYESthere also can set up a centralized management system for a chain that is “customizable to the Nth degree based on customer needs,” Andrews says.

Andrews takes issue with the Web-portal-only method. “I think folks who are trying to force people to work through a Web portal and charge them for that ... I think that’s a scary trend, in that when folks really figure out that they can interface directly its going to be difficult for them to explain themselves.”

Harris Douglas, national sales manager for privately owned DVR manufacturer Odyssey Technologies, says that one consideration when using digital video is that it must be encrypted if a restaurant needs to use video in court to prove a crime was committed or to defeat a phony slip-and-fall lawsuit.

His company, which offers the traditional DVR and camera service to mostly quick-service clients, puts a watermark on its videos that proves that the video has not been edited. “We have a secure remote software. If you need to download a clip and save it to a CD, it is court permissible. Video from [Internet Explorer] is not,” he says. “Any college geek can manipulate pictures.”

Steinfort had a mixed response to the question of encrypting video for use in court proceedings. “What we’ve found is that the need for that encryption is not really uniform. Some district attorneys will say that it’s more a chain of evidence that is important, but [encryption] is something we see on our road map,” he says.