a video surveillance system ingests a video stream from a remotely located video capture device . an application programming interface provides an interface for functions to interface between the video surveillance system and the remotely located video capture device . an analytics engine of the video surveillance system receives video sent through the api . the analytics engine compares an extracted metric from the video stream against at least one previously established value as part of assessing a previously established condition to generate either a true or a false result . when and only when a true result is generated , is a notification action performed that conveys a notification over a network using internet protocol communications to a previously designated user .