Block Surveillance delivers verified-response monitoring across North America on TetherX.

Table of contents

Overview

A verified-response monitoring stack for a continent that stopped rolling on bare alarms.

Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver police services moved to verified response only - a bare burglar-alarm activation no longer triggers a dispatch. Insurers, AHJs and municipal procurement followed: monitored sites that cannot prove the threat are increasingly outside the police priority queue and outside the insurance discount.

Block Surveillance saw the gap. Dealers selling traditional alarm-only contracts were watching their customers absorb $130-$176 fines per false dispatch and lose the after-hours intervention that monitoring is meant to provide. The fix was a service that put a human on every event before any dispatch request, delivered through a ULC-compliant central station, available bilingually 24/7 - and a platform underneath that integrators could resell without standing up their own monitoring centre.

Block Surveillance launched AI Guard as that service, and built it on TetherX as the underlying platform. The result is a single channel-only stack covering Canada, the USA and Mexico: cameras, alarms and access in one view, AI prefilter, bilingual live agents, ULC-compliant dispatch, verified-response evidence packs, all resold through the local dealer.

Challenge

Verified response is a workflow problem, not a feature.

To make AI Guard work, Block Surveillance needed every layer of the stack to cooperate. The traditional monitoring tools sold to ARCs were built for the bare-alarm era and started failing the moment verified response became a hard requirement.

• No native video at the alarm activation. Operators were jumping between an alarm monitoring application and a separate camera viewer, often a different platform per dealer. Verification stretched from seconds into minutes - long enough that police priority dropped and the offender was gone.
• Fragmented multi-vendor video. Dealers had Hikvision at some sites, Axis at others, Hanwha at a handful, a half-dozen camera brands across the book of business. A monitoring platform locked to one camera vendor would have meant turning away dealers.
• False-alarm fines bleeding the bottom line. Toronto $130 per event, Vancouver $176 escalating, Calgary and Edmonton in the $75-$100 range. A multi-site dealer was absorbing the equivalent of a junior operator salary in fines every quarter.
• Bilingual operator coverage. Quebec sites carry Charter of French Language Act (Bill 96) and Law 25 obligations - operators had to speak French, including for live talk-down, without contracting a separate Quebec provider.
• ULC-S301 compliance + insurer-readable evidence. Dispatches had to be traceable through an ULC central station, evidence had to hold up under the Canada Evidence Act, and insurers had to be able to verify the response model to apply premium discounts.

Solution

AI Guard, built on the TetherX control-room platform.

Block Surveillance adopted TetherX as the single platform behind every AI Guard deployment. Dealers install the cameras (any of 1,000+ supported brands), the TetherBox sits on the customer's network, and AI Guard operators handle the live verification on the same dashboard the dealer uses for service.

• AI prefilter on the TetherBox. Person, vehicle and animal detection runs at the edge on the local TetherBox - operators only see the events worth verifying, not every leaf-blowing trigger.
• Live agents on the same UI as the dealer. One platform for the SOC controller, the dealer technician and the end customer - cameras, alarms and access in a unified timeline. No window-switching between an alarm CRM and a video viewer.
• Bilingual EN+FR coverage 24/7. Live operators handle Quebec sites in French including talk-down, satisfying Bill 96 and Law 25 without contracting a separate provider.
• Tamper-evident evidence exports. Every clip carries a SHA-1 hash, a full audit log and a time-stamped export trail - meeting the Canada Evidence Act (s.31.1-31.8) standard for electronic records, and accepted by Intact, Aviva, Co-operators, Wawanesa, Desjardins and Northbridge.
• North American data residency. Video, metadata and audit logs stay on the continent (PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, BC PIPA handling), with a Canada-only region available for federal, healthcare and provincial procurement that requires it.
• Dealer-resellable. AI Guard is sold through the dealer channel - the customer relationship stays with the dealer, the central-station service is white-labelled, and the dealer earns recurring margin on the monitoring tier.

Results

Fines gone. Response under a minute. A monitoring service dealers can resell.

• 90% fewer false alarms. AI prefilter plus a live operator on every event eliminates the noise that drives municipal fines and erodes police dispatch priority.
• $0 false-alarm fines per verified event. Every dispatch carries operator verification, so the verified-response programmes in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver apply - no fines, police roll on a confirmed threat.
• Under 30 seconds from AI detection to live operator on camera. Talk-down audio typically begins 10-30 seconds after that. Police or guard dispatch follows with verified evidence attached - the operator can hand a clip and an incident timeline to the responder.
• Up to 90% faster evidence retrieval. The visual incident timeline groups events for scanning by event, not by hour, so controllers and dealers pull clips for insurer and police review in seconds rather than searching 24/7 footage.
• Insurance-approved across the major Canadian carriers. ULC-compliant central station plus verified evidence qualifies for premium discounts with Intact, Aviva, Co-operators, Wawanesa, Desjardins and Northbridge.
• RMR-positive from camera one for the dealer. Every install becomes a monitoring contract - margin on the platform subscription, margin on the monitoring tier, margin on any added cloud or AI services.
• Coverage across Canada, the USA and Mexico from a single ULC-compliant central station. One platform, one dispatch workflow, one evidence standard - whether the site is in Vancouver, Houston or Monterrey. Dealers expand into new provinces and states without standing up new monitoring infrastructure.