In Chicago, the CCTV installation you actually need is one HDMI cable, not a cable pull.

In most Chicago commercial and multifamily buildings built or renovated between 2012 and 2020, the answer is no. A Hikvision, Dahua, Lorex, Uniview, or Amcrest DVR is sitting in a closet or manager's office with 8, 16, or 25 cameras already pulled in conduit to it. That install was the hard one. The cables are in the walls, the conduit is in the ceiling, the channels are labeled, the DVR is recording. The piece that is missing is that no one is watching the live feeds, so trespassing, package theft, and tailgating go unnoticed until a resident complains. The install that closes that gap in 2026 is a single HDMI cable from the back of the existing DVR to a Cyrano edge AI unit. It is two minutes of physical work. It does not require a new camera. It does not require a new conduit run. It does not require a licensed Private Alarm Contractor Agency technician, because nothing is being wired. Only the HDMI monitor output of the DVR is being read.

The HDMI OUT port. Nearly every DVR and NVR sold in the US since about 2014 has one, because DVRs are designed to drive a monitor for a security guard to watch. That monitor output is a 1920x1080 composite image that the DVR paints by tiling live camera feeds into a grid. A 16-camera DVR paints a 4x4 grid, each tile is 480x270 pixels, and the DVR refreshes the whole composite at around 30 frames per second. A 25-camera DVR paints a 5x5 grid, each tile is 384x216. Cyrano plugs into that HDMI OUT, reads the composite, slices it back into per-tile feeds, and runs inference on each tile. The DVR does not know the Cyrano is there; from its perspective, it is just driving a monitor. All existing recording, retention, camera health, and ONVIF behavior on the DVR continues unchanged.

Because in Chicago the bottleneck on a traditional install is not the cameras or the DVR. It is the combination of a licensed contractor, a permit window, and a weather window. Illinois regulates private alarm and video surveillance installation under 225 ILCS 447 through the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, and most legitimate commercial CCTV installs in the city go through a PACA-licensed company. Their calendars in 2026 are booked three to six weeks out for anything other than emergency service. On top of that, the City of Chicago Department of Buildings requires permits for exterior low-voltage work, and the window for pulling exterior conduit through brick-and-timber commercial buildings (the dominant Chicago commercial stock) is effectively April through October. November to March, PVC conduit is brittle, caulk on exterior penetrations fails, and the premium on winter installs is real. A Cyrano HDMI install has none of those dependencies because nothing outside the room with the DVR is touched.

Under ten minutes on the ground. Two minutes of physical install: unplug the existing HDMI cable that goes from the DVR to the security guard's wall monitor (if there is one; many Chicago properties no longer use the wall monitor and the HDMI OUT is unused), plug the Cyrano unit into the DVR's HDMI OUT, run the passthrough HDMI from the Cyrano to the wall monitor if needed, connect the Cyrano to the building's network with a short ethernet run, and power it. Four minutes of on-tablet config: the device samples the HDMI signal, reads the DVR make/model from the EDID handshake, detects the 4x4 or 5x5 grid, the operator confirms which tile is which camera from a dropdown, the operator draws zones on the tiles that need them (dumpster alcove, mailroom door, restricted amenity), and links the WhatsApp thread that high-threat events will post to. A couple minutes of test-firing one event. That is the whole install. Median we see across properties is about 6 minutes.

A new 16-camera commercial CCTV installation in Chicago in 2026 typically quotes in the 6,000 to 18,000 dollar range for a labor-and-material package, depending on conduit runs, camera count, PoE switch upgrade, and whether exterior cameras need permitted mounting. Timeline 3 to 6 weeks. A Cyrano HDMI install on a building that already has a DVR is 450 dollars for the hardware, no installation labor that requires a contractor, and 200 dollars per month for the AI software. You keep every camera, every foot of conduit, every DVR channel, every hour of existing recording, every ONVIF stream. The math is not rip-and-replace versus AI; the math is whether you already have a DVR. If you do, the cheaper path is to not install new cameras at all.

Three cases. First, new construction with no existing cameras, where the cable pull is happening in open walls anyway and a cable-pull install amortizes across the build. Second, buildings with coverage gaps that a new camera on an existing DVR cannot close: a new exterior camera on a blind corner, a new garage camera where the DVR still has an open channel. That is a partial install, not a full one, and a PACA-licensed contractor is still in the loop for the one new drop. Third, buildings with DVRs old enough that they lack HDMI OUT (mostly pre-2012 analog BNC DVRs with VGA or composite output only). In the 2026 Chicago inventory that is a shrinking but nonzero share. For those buildings the honest recommendation is DVR replacement first, then Cyrano, and the total cost is still well under a full rip-and-replace.

No. Every frame of inference runs on the Cyrano unit sitting in the same room as the DVR. The only data that leaves the building is the event envelope when a HIGH threat fires: a short JSON record with the timestamp, the camera label, the zone label, the threat class, and a single thumbnail image, roughly 240 kilobytes per event. That is what gets posted to the on-call WhatsApp thread. The live camera feeds stay on the DVR. The composite HDMI signal stays on the Cyrano. No inbound ports need to be opened. The Cyrano uses only outbound HTTPS and WhatsApp delivery, the same traffic pattern as a thermostat or a doorbell. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14) is a real consideration for Chicago multifamily and commercial properties, and on-device inference with no upload is the cleanest posture against it.

Nothing changes, because the Cyrano HDMI OUT is a passthrough. The physical chain becomes DVR HDMI OUT to Cyrano HDMI IN, then Cyrano HDMI OUT to the existing wall monitor. The monitor continues to show the same 4x4 or 5x5 composite the DVR has always driven. A guard who walks in at 3am still sees the same thing they saw yesterday. The Cyrano sits transparently in line, reading the signal, without altering what the monitor displays. If the building no longer uses its wall monitor (common in Chicago properties that switched to remote monitoring), the passthrough can be left unterminated, in which case the Cyrano is simply the one thing plugged into the DVR's HDMI OUT.

Three questions. One, does the quoted install add a camera to a channel that is currently empty on my existing DVR, or is it re-running cable to a camera I already have? Any quote that is re-running to an existing camera is work the building does not need. Two, what is the line-item cost of the PACA-licensed labor as a percentage of the total, and would the building be materially better off if that labor was zero? For most quotes this is 40 to 60 percent of the bill. Three, what does the quote change about the alert behavior of the system (will anyone actually be notified when trespassing happens), or does it only change recording quality? If the answer is only recording quality, the building is paying for higher-resolution footage to scrub after incidents, not for fewer incidents. Cyrano changes only the second thing, at a fraction of the cost, without touching the first.

Yes. The HDMI composite output is a standardized signal regardless of DVR vendor. Cyrano ships install profiles for Hikvision DS-series, Dahua XVR and NVR lines, Lorex (which is Dahua-rebranded in most cases), Uniview, Amcrest, Swann, Reolink NVRs, and the several dozen OEM re-brands that Chicago integrators have shipped over the years. The only thing that varies per DVR brand is the overlay mask (which pixels hold the clock and channel bug), and those templates ship with the unit. The operator confirms it looks right at install time and moves on.

Three things, honestly. Higher resolution per camera if your existing cameras are 720p or 1080p analog and you want 4K. The Cyrano cannot upscale a 480x270 tile into a 4K feed; it reads what the DVR paints. If you want 4K footage for forensic zoom, you need new cameras. Two, new camera angles where there is currently no camera at all. The HDMI approach works with the cameras you have; it cannot invent coverage of a blind corner. Three, a fresh install warranty from a licensed contractor on the cable and mounting work. Those warranties are meaningful for buildings that have never had CCTV. For buildings that already have cabled cameras sitting on a DVR, they are already sunk cost. The HDMI path respects that sunk cost instead of billing against it a second time.

Yes, because under 225 ILCS 447 what is regulated is the design, installation, service, and maintenance of the alarm and camera system itself, not the addition of a monitoring device that reads the existing system's output. Plugging an HDMI cable into the monitor output of an already-installed, already-permitted DVR is functionally no different than plugging a second monitor into the same port. Nothing is wired into the alarm system. Nothing crosses a building code threshold. Nothing requires a DOB permit. The existing system remains the system of record for recording. If a PACA-licensed contractor installed the original system, they are still the right vendor for anything that touches the DVR configuration or the camera cabling; Cyrano does not touch either.