You don't need a new NVR — use the cameras you already have

There’s a familiar sales motion in physical security: to get “modern” cloud cameras, first throw away the cameras you have. New hardware, a new NVR, a new installer callout, and a new vendor who now owns the only box that can read your footage. It’s expensive, it’s slow, and most of the time it’s unnecessary.

If your existing IP cameras speak ONVIF or RTSP — and almost all of them do — you can keep them and still get cloud CCTV.

What ONVIF and RTSP actually are

Two open standards do the heavy lifting:

RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) is how an IP camera hands out its live video stream. Point the right URL at a camera and you get its feed. This is a decades-old, widely supported standard.
ONVIF is an industry interoperability spec that lets software discover cameras on a network and ask them for their stream details, without you hand-typing every model’s quirks.

Between them, they mean your camera isn’t a locked appliance — it’s a standards-based device that any compliant software can talk to. Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, TP-Link and dozens of other brands ship ONVIF/RTSP support. The camera on your wall is very likely already speaking a language the cloud can understand.

The agent model: no box to buy

So if the camera already streams, what’s missing? Something on your network to pick up those streams and relay them securely to the cloud. That’s the job of a small agent.

With Vigil, the agent is a native application you install on any always-on machine that can see your cameras — a mini-PC, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, a spare server. It runs on Windows, macOS or Linux, and there’s no Docker to wrangle. When it starts, it:

Installs ffmpeg (the workhorse that reads and repackages video) and sets itself to run on boot.
Auto-discovers cameras on the local network over ONVIF, and accepts RTSP URLs for anything it can’t find automatically.
Streams each camera up to AWS Sydney, converting RTSP into live HLS for the browser and pushing recordings to cloud storage.

That’s the whole architecture. No proprietary NVR sitting in a rack. No appliance that becomes e-waste when you switch vendors. If the agent’s host machine dies, you install the agent on another one and you’re back — nothing about your footage is trapped inside a single box.

Why this is better than a fresh hardware stack

You spend nothing on cameras you already own. The cost is the software, not a truck full of gear.
No installer, no lead time. Deploying software is a download and a double-click, not a scheduled site visit.
No lock-in. Because it’s built on open standards, you can add cameras from different brands, mix and match, and leave whenever you want — your recordings come with you.
It scales sideways. One agent can handle a site’s cameras; multiple agents cover multiple sites, all feeding one cloud console.

The honest caveats

Bring-your-own-camera isn’t magic. A camera has to be reachable on the network the agent lives on, and it needs enough upstream bandwidth to push its streams to the cloud — higher resolutions and more cameras mean more upload. Very old cameras with broken ONVIF implementations sometimes need their RTSP URL entered by hand. And the agent’s host machine does need to stay on; that’s the trade for not buying a dedicated recorder.

None of that is a reason to replace working cameras. It’s just the setup you’d do once.

The short version

If your cameras speak ONVIF or RTSP — and they almost certainly do — “buy all new hardware” is a choice the vendor made for their margin, not a technical requirement. A small agent on a machine you already have is enough to lift your existing cameras into the cloud. Keep the gear. Skip the NVR. Get the console.

Ready to see it? Vigil turns the cameras you already own into cloud CCTV in an afternoon — hosted in AWS Sydney, A$10/camera/month. Start free →