Intelligent video surveillance (IVS) offers a large spectrum of different applications that have strict requirements on quality of service (QoS) and energy-efficiency. Recent embedded IVS systems need to deliver compressed video data in high quality while using devices that are partly solar- or battery-powered. In this paper we present PoQoS, a novel hierarchical approach for combined power- and QoS-management in distributed embedded IVS systems. PoQoS allows the implementation of both global and local power- and QoSadaptation in order to achieve optimal energy/QoS tradeoffs. Furthermore, we present a DSP-based, embedded platform that is used for IVS. It includes QoS-triggered onboard dynamic power management (DPM) that is controlled via Ethernet. We demonstrate the feasibility of PoQoS with a typical IVS-setup and present experimental results.