As surveillance video has grown increasingly popular, it's popped up in more and more everyday places. It watches the cashier in fast-food restaurants. It captures identities of customers at convenience stores. It watches from the corners of downtown office buildings. It pans, tilts and zooms from dome cameras mounted on lampposts in urban districts.

It's even been found to some extent on transit system buses, though a mobile bus system has always presented a unique challenge. First, only today's newer buses have cameras built in (like the one's Bombardier is providing to Toronto's transit system -- see story); the others require time-consuming retrofits. Secondly, bus systems need to be "hardened" type systems to deal with the rough city streets, so not just any mounting system and DVR will do. And finally, the problem has always been that the video resides on the bus, making it a time-consuming and sometimes labor intensive task to take video off the bus. It's complicated by the fact that buses are designed to spend their time on the streets, delivering passengers, rather than back at a bus depot, downloading video via a network cable.

That's the situation that Christine Beaudin, principal of network services for IBM, found when IBM landed a $2.4 million project with the Chicago Transit Authority. IBM was selected to be the networked services and security integrator for the beginning of a massive mobile bus security project that would eventually place cameras on all of the city's buses. But it wasn't just a job of wiring up cameras to DVRs -- that was already done. Chicago's Transit Authority wanted the video to be useful; it wasn't good enough for the video to simply sit on the bus as an archive of the incident. The CTA and Chicago's police representatives wanted to be able to access the video in real-time if an incident was occurring.

It patterned well with what Chicago and Illinois' Cook County area was already doing in high-crime areas with its "eyes in the sky" street cameras and gunshot detectors that fed to a police monitoring station. The problem, of course, was how to make that video accessible.

That's where IBM network services crew stepped in, headed up by Beaudin and her team.