The disclosed Near Real-Time Video (NRTV) system is a complete video processing, smart dissemination and user display capability for dissemination of video data from surveillance systems, such as manned and unmanned aerial surveillance platforms. The system requires significantly less bandwidth for dissemination than traditional, full analog video distribution. The exemplary system ingests an analog video source signal from a surveillance platform, digitizes the video, and allows a local or remote user to visualize frames of the video field of view on a standard map display. From an overlay of the field(s) of view, the system allows the user to request selected images or a video clip from the actual video surveillance information. Using available communications, the request is relayed to the video processing subsystem, and a video file of the requested information is generated and sent back to the user for display, all in near real-time.