Two products with the same surname. And they are not the same.

Unity Video is the classic route: a recorder —often a box from the manufacturer with the software inside— in your building, recording on your drive. You buy it once and what you pay afterwards is maintenance.

Alta is the other one: the camera sends the video to the cloud, there is no recorder and no server to maintain, and you pay a fee per camera per year. What arrives later is that the fee does not end, and that the price is set by the days you want to keep, not by the cameras.

The problem both of them solve: searching the video and not just watching it. «A person in a red jacket came in at about six» is, in a normal system, an hour dragging the timeline. Appearance search is the function this brand sells on.

Unity is organised into sites: several servers that share configuration and split the cameras between them, with no central one that everything depends on in order to record. In the higher editions they cover for each other, and that is designed in: it does not come free just from having two machines.

Its distinctive piece is how it handles the streams: it sends each window the detail that window needs, so with sixteen cameras up in a mosaic none of them sends you its twelve megapixels. That is what lets it carry very large cameras without choking the network.

For several premises, Unity sees several sites from one client and it works. What has to be looked at is the link, and that management is still per site: with five premises it goes well, with thirty the work turns into inventory and versions.

In Alta the only thing you size is the upload line, and that is its weak point. If it does not give enough, the system leans on the camera's local recording and fills in when it can: that saves the bad day. We measure the real line at peak time, not the one in the contract.

Its access control integrates with its video without gateways, both in the classic line and in the cloud one —which comes from buying a cloud access manufacturer, and that is why it has that logic of the credential on the phone—. That is weeks less and a single support desk.

With intruder detection and with third parties, the route is the SDK and the modules of its integration programme. The catalogue is noticeably shorter than that of the platforms that live on being open, so here we promise nothing without checking the exact model and version.

Third-party cameras come in over ONVIF and they are viewed and recorded; what does not come in is the analytics, which is the reason for buying. There is a middle route: a box that applies the engines to other makers' cameras, with its cost and its channel limit.

Unity, per channel and per edition, and the edition sets what can be done: several servers, cover between them, some search functions. On top of that, the manufacturer's annual maintenance, which entitles you to new versions.

Alta is a subscription per camera per year, and the storage band is what moves the price. Thirty days and ninety are not the same invoice, nor anything like it, and retention is not a technical matter: it comes out of what the lawyer or the insurer says. That conversation goes first.

The sum almost nobody does is the one at five years. In the first year the cloud wins nearly always; in the fifth it depends. And in its column you have to put what the recorder does not buy: no server, no version jump, no dead drive in year four.

With Unity, IT keeps the equipment, the storage, the network and the backups. Being a closed box from the manufacturer, it is considerably less work than a platform of several services on your own servers, and for a small department that is a real advantage.

With Alta it keeps almost nothing: network, upload and access. That is the cloud argument, and with a single systems person it is a strong argument. What it gains it loses in control: the manufacturer decides the version and applies it when it wants.

Security keeps the same in both cases: users and permissions, which camera is seen by whom, retention by zone, alarms and exporting. This is the easiest of the six for the security team to work on their own, and that is a point in its favour that deserves saying.

What is not left in daily use: the retention and the recording quality, which are two boxes and move terabytes. And facial recognition, which needs written authorisation and a legal conversation first, not a user permission. We say no there often.

What is left to the integrator is the version jumps in Unity, the extensions with their licence and the tuning of the analytics when the scene changes. In Alta, more contract work: watching that the storage band matches what is really being kept.

Training: half a day for the operator focused on searching, which is what justifies the purchase, and a day for whoever administers permissions and retention. Plus a list of which camera has which analytics: it answers 80 % of the questions of the first two years.

What it brings, and brings well: classification of what it sees in the camera itself, appearance search across cameras, detection of unusual movement, number plates, and facial recognition where the law allows it.

The condition, for the last time: that lives in this manufacturer's own cameras. With third parties over ONVIF most of it is not there, and the box that applies the engines to other makers' cameras has its cost and its channel limit. There is no free version of this.

The real limit: it answers «what is there» and «where else has this appeared» very well, and not «what is happening here». It finds a person; it does not understand that they are doing something they should not. Detection of the unusual marks the odd thing without knowing what it is.

And since this is a recommendation with an interested party in it, here it is declared: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS from Infinity Neural, the other company in the group. It is our product. Whoever recommends their own without saying so loses the right to be believed.

They live together: Unity governs the cameras, the recording and the permissions, and brings an excellent visual search over its own hardware; IRIS brings the understanding of the scene. If what you need is to find somebody quickly in yesterday's video, this already does it.