Every year, the number of cameras deployed around the world grows. Traffic intersections, factory floors, retail stores, hospitals, farms, national parks. The hardware is already out there, generating continuous visual data at a scale that most organizations barely tap into.
For developers, that represents an enormous opportunity. Not to build another recording system, but to build applications that turn visual information into something people can actually act on.
Nx EVOS is Network Optix's Enterprise Video Operating System. It's the foundation behind products like Nx Witness and Nx Go, and it exists for one core reason: to give developers a production-ready base to build video-powered applications without having to construct the underlying infrastructure from scratch.
This article is for the people with the ideas, the ones who look at a camera feed and see a product, a service, or a business that doesn't exist yet.
Building a video-powered application means solving a long list of infrastructure problems before you even get to the part that makes your product unique. Device discovery, video ingestion, storage, bandwidth management, user permissions, security, remote access. All of that has to work before the intelligence layer can run on top of it.
Without a shared foundation, every development team ends up rebuilding the same base infrastructure from the ground up. That eats time and budget that should be going toward the application itself.
Nx EVOS provides that foundation. It manages video streams from thousands of devices, handles storage and indexing, provides cloud connectivity, supports AI model deployment at the edge, and gives developers a complete set of tools to build and scale their products. The developer focuses on what makes their application valuable. Nx EVOS takes care of everything below it.
Network Optix runs regular hackathons that challenge developers to build working applications on the platform in short timeframes. The results give a clear picture of how wide the possibilities are.
Wildlife conservation: A team called BroBots built GARUD, a system that uses drones, camera feeds, and AI to identify and track animals across national parks in real time. Rangers monitor animal movements, tourists locate wildlife, and researchers collect behavioral data for conservation. The system also detects potential poachers and sends immediate alerts. Built on Nx EVOS using YOLO v8 and OpenCV.
Retail automation: First-place winner VisionNxt built ShopkAIper, which automates daily store operations using cameras that are already installed. It analyzes customer behavior, helps optimize store layouts, and provides insights that improve how retail spaces are managed.
Smart parking: ThingTank built a parking management system that replaces expensive sensors with existing security cameras. It monitors lot occupancy in real time, tracks total capacity, and can even detect vehicle fires. Less hardware, lower costs, and better accuracy.
Crowd safety: The 2025 Venue Innovation Hackathon produced working solutions for crowd flow monitoring, safety alerts, audience engagement analytics, and access control across stadiums, metro stations, and concert halls.
These are working applications, not mockups. Small teams built each one in a matter of weeks. Wildlife tracking, retail analytics, parking optimization, public safety, all from the same platform.
If any of these examples resonate with a challenge or opportunity in your own organization, you don't need to be a developer to take the next step. Share our developer whitepaper with your technical team and start a conversation about what's possible, or reach out to our solutions team to discuss how we might help bring your idea to life.
A traditional VMS records and plays back video. Nx EVOS is designed to be built on.
Here's what that means in practice:
Connect any video source: From IP cameras and drones to body-worn devices, IoT sensors, and proprietary hardware, Nx EVOS brings them all into one environment without vendor lock-in or compatibility dead ends.
Run any AI model: Train in the framework of your choice, upload once, and the platform handles optimization and deployment across your entire fleet.
Build custom interfaces: Embed your own web applications directly inside the desktop client to create tailored dashboards, search tools, or operational views.
Store data on your terms: Use built-in storage or connect third-party systems, whether local or cloud, with full control over retention, cost, and data sovereignty.
Access everything through open APIs: Nearly every feature in the system is available programmatically, so third-party systems can query, control, and exchange data without waiting for a custom integration.
Deploy anywhere: Windows, Linux, Mac, ARM, Docker, and virtual environments, with support for over 25,000 devices across 1,200+ manufacturers.
What matters most isn't any single tool. It's that they all work together. A developer can train a model, deploy it to edge hardware, overlay results on live video, trigger automated workflows through the rules engine, and surface all of that through the API, within the same environment.
The hackathon examples show what small teams accomplished in weeks. With a dedicated effort and a real use case behind it, the ceiling is significantly higher.
A few of the directions people in other fields are already exploring:
Environmental monitoring: Tracking deforestation, observing water levels, and documenting ecological change using camera infrastructure that's already in place.
Industrial quality control: Converting factory cameras into automated inspection systems that detect defects and feed production data into operational dashboards.
Urban operations: Turning city camera networks into real-time management tools for traffic, utilities, and public services coordination.
Healthcare logistics: Monitoring patient flow, managing facility capacity, and improving response times using visual data from cameras that are already deployed.
Agricultural intelligence: Analyzing crop conditions, livestock behavior, and environmental factors across farms and production facilities.
Each of these builds on cameras and infrastructure that already exist, but they’ve been given a much more important role.
Nx EVOS is available for free through Nx Meta, the developer sandbox that provides full access to the entire Nx EVOS component suite and developer tools. You can prototype, test, and build without any licensing cost.
When your application is ready to go to market, the path forward is a commercial Nx EVOS license or a build on Nx Witness for security-focused deployments.
What is Nx EVOS? Network Optix's Enterprise Video Operating System. It's the open, modular foundation that powers Nx Witness, Nx Go, and custom video applications. It handles video ingestion, storage, cloud connectivity, AI deployment, and user management so developers can focus on their product.
Is it free for developers? Yes. Nx Meta provides full access to all Nx EVOS components and tools at no cost for prototyping and testing.
What developer tools are available? Nx Toolkit includes the Analytics SDK, Video Source SDK, Storage SDK, open-source client, HTTP Server API, Analytics API, Nx Cloud API, Nx Connect API, inClient JS API, and a NodeJS WebRTC Manager package.
Can I deploy my own AI models? Yes. Nx AI Manager supports any model exported to ONNX. Upload once and the platform optimizes it for your target hardware automatically.
What programming languages are supported? The core SDKs use C++, but the REST APIs work with any language. The Analytics API enables integration without native C++ development, and the inClient JS API uses JavaScript.
What industries are people building for? Conservation, retail, parking, crowd safety, transportation, industrial automation, agriculture, healthcare, and more. The platform is industry-agnostic by design.
If any of this sparked an idea, the next step is getting your development team involved. We've put together a detailed whitepaper that walks through every tool in the Nx Toolkit at the implementation level.
Share the whitepaper with your team and start exploring what's possible, or download Nx Meta to start building today.