We used a combination of cheap ($20) webcams, motion, cron, nagios, and cfengine at Drexel to provide 24/7 monitoring of our CS labs. It isn't streaming video

We used a combination of cheap ($20) webcams, motion, cron, nagios, and cfengine at Drexel to provide 24/7 monitoring of our CS labs. It isn't streaming video but it's good enough (several pictures per second while there is motion in the room). Since installation is has been used to solve exactly 0 crimes, which was in line with our intent.