No New Software Required: A Smarter Way to Get Sewer Inspection Data Into Your GIS

Most utilities are sitting on a mountain of CCTV sewer inspection footage. The cameras have run, the crawlers have crawled, and somewhere on a hard drive (or a stack of them) is a complete picture of what's happening inside your collection system. The hard part isn't capturing the footage. It's turning all of it into accurate, standardized, decision-ready data without drowning your team in the process. 

The industry's usual answer is software: buy a platform, license seats for your staff, train everyone, keep up with version upgrades, and maintain it year after year. That works for some utilities. But it also asks a lot of organizations that are already stretched thin and it puts the burden of coding, reviewing, and managing the data squarely back on you. 

There's another way to think about this problem. 

The problem with "just buy more software" 

When the only option on the table is a software platform, the costs add up in ways that aren't always obvious upfront: 

• You're paying for licenses and per-user seats, whether or not everyone uses them. 

• Someone on your team has to be trained to code inspections to standard and stay current as standards and software evolve. 

• Every upgrade is a project: testing, migrating, retraining. 

• The work of actually reviewing footage and producing reliable defect data still lands on your staff. 

In other words, the software is a tool, but you're still the one swinging the hammer. For utilities without spare capacity to take on yet another platform, that's a real barrier to getting value out of inspections they've already paid to perform. 

A different model: data-as-a-service 

PipeAid takes a different approach. Instead of selling you another platform to learn and maintain, we deliver something more useful: clean, standardized, ready-to-use data coded for you and dropped right back into the tools you already have. 

Here's how it works: 

1. You send us your CCTV footage. Whatever inspection videos you've already collected, in the formats you already have. 

2. Our AI codes every defect to NASSCO standards. The footage runs through our system, which identifies and codes defects across all three NASSCO protocols: PACP for pipelines, MACP for manholes, and LACP for laterals. 

3. Our team performs QA/QC on the results. AI does the heavy lifting, but trained reviewers verify the coding for accuracy. You get the speed of automation with the confidence of a human check. 

4. We hand the finished data back on your GIS. The coded data lands in the system your team already uses every day. No new login, no migration, no learning curve. 

The result is that your inspection footage becomes structured, standardized intelligence about your system and you didn't have to buy, build, or babysit anything new to get it. 

Built on the tools you already use 

This is the part that makes the data-as-a-service model click for a lot of utilities: you use whatever you already have. 

No new software to purchase. No additional user seats to license. No upgrade cycles to manage. No staff to train on a new platform. Your team keeps working in the GIS environment they already know, and the defect data is simply there waiting for them. 

And because the data lives in your GIS, every defect is mapped in context. Click a segment of pipe and you can see its condition coding right alongside the pipe attributes you already track material, diameter, age, and more. Need to dig deeper? The supporting images and video are attached for reference, so anyone on your team can pull up the footage behind any defect and verify it for themselves. 

That turns a passive archive of inspection videos into an active, spatial view of your collection system's health, one your engineers, operators, and planners can all work from. 

Why it matters 

Coded, standardized inspection data is the foundation of good collection-system decisions: where to prioritize rehabilitation, how to plan capital spending, how to defend a budget request, and how to stay ahead of failures instead of reacting to them. The faster and more reliably you can get that data, and the more easily your team can access it, the better those decisions get. 

The software-platform model puts that data behind a tool you have to own and operate. The data-as-a-service model just hands you the data. 

If your utility is sitting on inspection footage and wishing it were already coded, mapped, and ready to use without taking on another piece of software that's exactly the problem PipeAid was built to solve. 

Have CCTV footage waiting to be put to work? Let's talk about getting it into your GIS, coded and ready.