Options for Accessing Cameras

As a technology partner, it is not always clear how to get access to cameras on the Eagle Eye Networks VMS. This article will explore two current strategies and one option that we will offer in the future.

Option 1: Create a user in each account

The simplest option is to have a user created and given access to the cameras you need. This user is created the same as any other and the permissions are controlled through the standard VMS settings.

This is not ideal if you are wanting access to cameras across a large number of accounts because of the overhead needed to juggle account credentials. This strategy works well if you are get a video or image on a preiodic or scheduled basis instead of monitoring in real time. If you are subscribing to the poll stream for each camera you may want to look at the next approach.

Another caveat is that each user in our system needs a unique email address so you might need to comeup with a naming scheme for email aliasses (such as name+identifier@domain.com).

Option 2: Share cameras into an account

The second option is to create a new account that have other cameras shared into. In our VMS we provide the option to share a camera with any email address.

This will give you read access to the camera, which is enough for most use cases.

You can subscribe to the real-time poll stream for the cameras shared with you. This can simplify the need to manage multiple poll stream connections when switching between users (as in the first option).

Future Option: Machine to machine tokens

We are exploring an option for supporting long-running machine to machine authentication tokens. These would be suitable to embedding inside of the code for an application.

What else can we do with this?

I hope this helps to explain the common options for getting access to cameras. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us at api_support@een.com