While most of the time security video is used to review things that have happened in the past, where the expectation of real-time video is not a concern, there are scenarios where live viewing, and reduced latency, is a primary concern. Casinos are one example that many people are familiar with, but other applications, such as monitoring tranportation systems, theme-park rides, or high security ingress/egress points often value live video that is as close to real-time as possible.
Few, if any, tools exist to provide a way to measure the latency between when an event happens, and when a remote operator sees the same event on their security monitor. For a recent project I was contracted to find a way to measure video latency in a test environment setup to mimic a production deployment. The solution is the meter you see in the above pic. This report covers the approach used, and some of the findings along the way.