Without question, one of the great growth areas of the electronic security industry for the foreseeable future will be video recording.

There’s an initial fixation that occurs with a video surveillance experience, whether it’s a jury watching clips in a capital-crime case, the monitoring of live action on the docks, or watching the kids in the school cafeteria.

After a while, the novelty wears off and human real-time monitoring becomes sleep inducing — which is why video has to be recorded for later retrieval. The continued developments in technology and the greater need for video security beg the question: What’s next?

New Users Adopt Video Surveillance
As government and industry benefit from visual evidence in their work to protect our way of life, they’re also discovering the potential power of video surveillance.

It’s well known that retail chains are experimenting with video for internal theft control, food-handling regimens and grocery-shelf sales velocities. Law enforcement organizations are monitoring practices, procedures and event control. Factories are surveying assembly, just-in-time inventories and throughput operations. Homeowners are also discovering the value of monitoring nonsecurity activities.

As these discoveries and innovative uses grow, the need for huge video recording capabilities will also grow in kind.

Future Shows Boost for NVRs
The question on the minds of manufacturers is what type of equipment will be used to gather and manage all this video in the future?

Ten years ago, VCRs were the product of choice. While sales of those products are nearing extinction, more than 30 percent of security users still utilize VCRs to store valuable video records.

DVRs rule the roost now, of course, and integrators have become experts at recommending and selling them. But developments in IP video systems have presented management with the need to understand the production, inventory and pricing consequences of the rising sales trend in network video recorders (NVRs) on the DVR market.

Dealers and integrators were asked for their thoughts on this subject in J.P. Freeman Co.’s 2006 market investigation of trends in the video surveillance industry. As shown in the charts on the bottom of this page, these installers report that 84 percent of the recorders they sold in 2005 were DVRs, 11 percent were NVRs, 4 percent were VCRs and 1 percent were mobile DVRs.

Looking forward, dealers and integrators see this picture changing. They believe that by 2010, DVR sales will account for only 50 percent of recorder sales and that NVRs will have jumped from an 11- to 44-percent share of all recorder sales.

Five-year forecasts are difficult challenges since pricing, product quality, the sales trend of IP cameras, training and other issues can affect sales levels materially. But integrator viewpoints are important at this stage of IP video development.

 

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our FREE digital newsletters!

Related Content