This summary 1 aims at presenting an overview of the CEC-ESPRIT AVS-RIO (Advanced Video Surveillance -Advanced Video Surveillance - Cable Television Based Remote Video surveillance System for Protected sites Monitoring) project. The peculiarity of the project consists both in the video-surveillance application considered (i.e. the monitoring of tourist and naturalistic places), and in the communication mean used for the remote transmission of information from the observed sites to the remote elaboration center, which is a coaxial cable network for local community TV broadcasting (CATV network). The multimedia information is acquired by video sensors (i.e. TV cameras) and transmitted through the CATV network to a remote control center, where a PC-based High Performance Computing Network (HPCN) architecture performs the image processing tasks needed by the implementation of the system functionalities. The functional specifications of the system will be briefly exposed, together with the HW/SW tools needed for the system implementation.