There was a time when checking your security cameras meant walking over to a bulky recorder tucked away in a closet and scrolling through hours of footage. The idea of watching live video from your phone sounded almost absurd.
“I remember a lot of people calling us crazy,” Andrew Nassar, CTO of IC Realtime, told Refresh Miami. “Who wants to look at their cameras on their phones?”
Nearly two decades later, that prediction seems quaint. Consumers now expect to access security feeds from anywhere, search footage using AI, and receive alerts only when something genuinely unusual happens. For IC Realtime, a South Florida company celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, staying relevant has meant evolving alongside every major technology shift.
Founded in 2006, IC Realtime designs and manufactures AI-powered video surveillance systems for residential, commercial, and government customers. Headquartered in Pompano Beach, the company employs about 75 people across Florida and Arizona and serves customers through a nationwide dealer network.
For Nassar, the story started even earlier.
“I was the kid taking apart the parents’ products,” he said. “The radios, the TVs, the stereo systems, anything I could get my hands on. It’s always been a passion of mine to see how things work.”
That curiosity led him into engineering and manufacturing, and eventually to leading the company’s technology strategy.
IC Realtime launched just as the surveillance industry was shifting away from analog CCTV systems and toward digital video recorders. When smartphones appeared, the company quickly developed a mobile app that let users monitor their cameras remotely.
Today, the company is focused on another major shift: artificial intelligence. Rather than simply detecting motion, AI can identify people, vehicles, and behaviors, allowing users to search archived footage with natural language instead of manually reviewing hours of video.
“We’re now able to make sense of what we’re seeing,” Nassar said. The goal is also to reduce false alarms. Instead of sending notifications every time someone walks past a camera, newer systems can recognize when something actually appears out of the ordinary.
“What about the anomalies?” Nassar said. “I’ve noticed trend X, and now something has broken in that chain.”
Another key focus is processing data locally rather than sending everything to the cloud. IC Realtime is investing heavily in edge AI, where cameras and recorders perform much of the analysis themselves. That reduces bandwidth costs, speeds up response times, and addresses growing customer concerns around privacy.
“We keep data as much as we can locally,” Nassar said.
The company’s future also reflects a broader shift across the tech industry. While IC Realtime built its business around hardware, software has become an increasingly important part of its strategy. Customers expect modern, easy-to-use interfaces, while installers want tools that help them monitor systems remotely and spot problems before their clients notice.
“We’re investing a lot of energy and time into software,” Nassar said. “That’s what customers are asking for.”
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