The unique M2sat MarineCam provides shipping companies with a cost efficient and feature rich video system to get live video streams and still pictures directly from their vessels to the Internet. The system is optimized to use existing on-board satellite equipment such as Inmarsat Fleet 55 or 77, FleetBroadband or VSAT equipment and use the relatively low speed bandwidth of maritime services (up to 256 kbps) for it’s video and still picture transmissions. Shipping companies start to use MarineCam video services mainly for commercial reasons. The appearance of broadband services in the maritime market over the last 2 years brings massive opportunities for shipping companies and maritime fleet operators. Vessels are now in an always-on connection with the Internet and corporate network allowing a constant monitoring of ships and cargo. The increased broadband bandwidth that is now available for the first time, allows the use of maritime video to improve fleet operations but the first users of the MarineCam system indicate it also brings real commercial opportunities.
Where the first MarineCam applications mainly emerged in the commercial area, maritime customers such as shipping companies, governmental maritime organizations, or yacht owners in future will use maritime video more and more to improve the ships operations, for security reasons, or to help and solve on-board problems more efficiently. Think of monitoring the ships operations by video, like loading operations in ports, record videos of accidents for insurance reasons, or use the system for video inspection of faulty parts or damages by remote experts. Maritime video will also be applied in the domain of human resources management, for the staff to stay in touch with families at home and for telemedicine applications involving remote medical assistance. Important area for Maritime video systems will also be to help and increase ship and staff security, e.g., as tool to fight crime and piracy. All videos and pictures can be viewed with standard PCs with Internet access on shore, but the shipping company has full control over who can watch the material and all transmissions are fully secure. Authorised viewers can select individual ships, look at stored still pictures or activate the on board cameras. They can even control the on board camera remotely. Shipping companies manage all user rights to this and in addition can limit the time for individual viewers to manage the costs (of the satellite connection). The system is fully IP-based and it can be tailored to maritime customers’ needs and easily integrated into corporate networks.