As more and more CCTV cameras are installed, the security industry is facing the problem of how to monitor, record and retrieve a glut of multimedia data effectively. To be able to make use of this data, we need to be able to analyse the video in realtime and identify specific events. If these events are highlighted as they happen, an operator monitoring a bank of video monitors can concentrate on those which are more likely to be significant. We also need to make it possible to identify and retrieve quickly content that meets particular criteria. The aim of the RETRIEVE project is to enhance CCTV surveillance systems by providing effective content-based search and retrieval mechanisms for digital video archives (see Perrott, A.J. et al., Proc. SPIE Internet Multimedia Management Systems III, 2002). We present a surveillance application and show how this can be used to provide content-based searching, browsing, retrieval and playback for intelligent distributed surveillance systems. Finally, we discuss the utility of XML stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) in working with MPEG-7 descriptions. (5 pages)