// REFERENCE · A–Z

The language of
security monitoring.

Acronyms, vendors, and concepts you'll hear on the floor.

C// 3 ENTRIES

CCTV: Closed-circuit television. The umbrella term integrators still use for any camera system, even when none of it is closed-circuit anymore.
Chain of custody: The unbroken paper trail proving who handled a piece of evidence, when, and what they did with it. Critical for insurance and prosecution; almost impossible with email + Dropbox.
Camect: An edge recording appliance popular with integrators serving residential and small commercial. Strong on AI alerts, light on package export — which is where IncidentClips slots in.

D// 3 ENTRIES

DW Spectrum: Digital Watchdog's VMS. Heavily used by mid-market integrators; ships native clip export but no chain-of-custody wrapper.
Dispatch desk: The operator station inside a monitoring company where incoming alarms, customer calls, and law enforcement requests get triaged and acted on.
Dropbox: The de facto evidence delivery mechanism for 70% of monitoring companies. Fast, familiar, and completely wrong for video evidence.

E// 2 ENTRIES

Evidence package: A bundle of clips, narrative, timeline, and metadata that travels as one sealed unit. The unit of work for a modern dispatch desk.
Edge recorder: On-site hardware (Camect, Eagle Eye, etc.) that records video locally and pushes alerts/clips to the cloud. Reduces bandwidth, adds export friction.

F// 2 ENTRIES

FTP: The pre-Dropbox way of moving clips. Still surprisingly common at older monitoring companies and law enforcement intake desks.
Footage retention: How long video is stored on the edge or in the cloud before it's overwritten. Typically 7–30 days. The clock that turns every request into a scramble.

I// 3 ENTRIES

IMMIX: Sureview's central station automation platform. A major piece of the dispatch stack at most modern monitoring companies.
Incident package: An evidence package scoped to a single incident — one event, one timeline, one shareable URL. The atomic unit of IncidentClips.
Integrator: The systems integrator who specs, installs, and maintains a security stack at the customer site. Usually the entity that recommends a monitoring company.

M// 2 ENTRIES

Monitoring company: The 24/7 SOC operating remote alarm response, video verification, and incident dispatch for hundreds or thousands of customer sites. IncidentClips' primary customer.
Manual export: The operator-driven flow of opening a VMS, scrubbing to a timestamp, clipping a range, downloading a file, then emailing or uploading it. The work IncidentClips removes.

P// 3 ENTRIES

Package layer: The IncidentClips abstraction that sits between the VMS and the recipient — wrapping clips with narrative, chain-of-custody, and a passcode-gated portal.
Passcode-gated link: A delivery URL that requires a one-time code (out-of-band) to open. Replaces the wide-open Dropbox link and produces an actual audit log.
Portal: The branded, customer-facing surface where end-customers receive, review, and download their incident packages. Owned by the monitoring company, hosted by IncidentClips.

R// 2 ENTRIES

RMR: Recurring Monthly Revenue. The metric that defines a monitoring company's enterprise value at exit. Anything that raises ARPU per site moves RMR.
Receipt: The cryptographic proof, attached to every delivered package, that records who opened it, from where, and when. The artifact that ends chain-of-custody disputes.

S// 3 ENTRIES

Sureview: Maker of IMMIX, the dominant central station automation platform. IncidentClips works alongside Sureview/IMMIX today via manual upload of VMS exports.
Sealed package: An evidence package that has been signed, locked, and timestamped — no further edits possible. The point at which a package becomes legally meaningful.
SOC 2: The compliance framework most insurers and enterprise customers require of any vendor handling sensitive operational data. IncidentClips runs on SOC2-compliant infrastructure (Supabase, Mux, Vercel); a SOC2 Type II audit of IncidentClips itself is on the roadmap.

V// 3 ENTRIES

VMS: Video Management System. The software (Spectrum, Genetec, Milestone, etc.) that records, stores, and plays back camera feeds. Where every clip starts.
Verkada: Cloud-native camera vendor with a strong direct-to-end-user motion. A frequent integration target — and frequently a competitor for the dispatch wedge.
Vendor lock-in: The structural cost of being unable to change a piece of your stack without breaking the rest of it. IncidentClips is explicitly designed to avoid it.