2010: A Good Year
Three technological advancements could make 2010 IP video’s best year yet
- By Carla Saavedra
- Dec 01, 2009
“It’s all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.” Gordon Gekko may have been talking to Bud Fox about Wall Street trading practices when he uttered that infamous line -- second only to his “greed is good” speech -- but his wise words to a rising trader still ring true today. Only now it’s not about how much one can make, but about how much one can save.
The September 2008 financial meltdown brought every industry to the brink of collapse. Faced with the all-too-real possibility of economic ruin, companies began streamlining their organizations and rethinking the way they did business.
The security industry is no different. Installers, manufacturers and end users alike are thinking of ways to streamline the way they think about security. The dust may be beginning to clear, but it looks like people’s frugal spending behaviors are here to stay -- for awhile, at least.
2010 will be a big year for IP video. The technology’s benefits reflect what businesses are trying to do in general: cut costs without sacrificing quality.
Clearly, the biggest advantage IP video has over analog is how much easier it is to install.
“Most customers already have pretty extensive network cabling infrastructure in their buildings,” said John B. Murdock, vice president of the security division at Netcom Technologies Inc. “And what we’re finding is that customers already have the infrastructure in place close to where a camera would go.”
And because IP video is relatively easy to install, end users save money on skills training.
“There’s a very high turnover rate in the installer community,” said Steve van Till, president and CEO of Brivo. “So when you have complex products, that turnover rate hurts you a great deal because you’re constantly investing a lot of money in training new people.”
Now that IP video is coming out of its infancy, manufacturers are developing new ways to improve upon the technology’s advantages. Three relatively new advancements could be the key to increasing IP video’s popularity.
H.264
Although version one of the H.264/AVC standard was finalized by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Organisation for Standardisation/International Electrotechnical Commission in 2003, the video compression technology was not widely used in security products until a few years ago.
H.264 builds on the earlier compression standards of MPEG- 2 and MPEG-4 Visual, allowing manufacturers to transmit higher-quality video at lower bit rates than previous standards.
And because one of the biggest drawbacks of IP-based technology is storage capacity, H.264 allows more video to be stored at the same bitrate. For example, a single-layer DVD can store two hours of movie footage in MPEG-2 format. With H.264, the same DVD can store up to four hours or more of movie-quality footage. Moreover, H.264 can deliver better quality footage at the same bitrate compared with earlier standards.
The technology, however, does have its drawbacks. IQinVision, an IP video and intelligent network camera manufacturer since 1998, has been studying H.264 for about two-and-a-half years.
“It’s not quite the silver bullet that everyone thinks it is,” said Paul Bodell, chief marketing officer of IQinVision, explaining that H.264 works best in very bright environments with little movement that require a frame rate of more than 15 frames per second.
IQinVision waited a couple of years before launching a complete line of H.264 cameras -- revealed in September at ASIS -- because it wanted to know more about the commonly misunderstood technology. “We wanted to make sure that everyone knows that we’re committed to it,” Bodell said.
Like all technologies, H.264 is constantly evolving. Version 10 -- its final draft approved in July 2009 -- has an amendment containing Multiview Video Encoding, which enables viewers to capture video from multiple cameras using a single video stream.
Eventually, H.264 will be the optimal technology for any type of IP video environment.
We Have an App for That
iPhone app mania has infiltrated the security industry as well. The wide availability of wireless and IP infrastructure has opened the doors to mobile video surveillance, in which clients can monitor video feeds from their PDAs.
MobiDEOS’ MobileCamViewer -- which won the Security Products’ New Product of the Year 2009 award in Video Surveillance -- is a downloadable mobile software application (an actual iPhone app) that lets users view camera footage through their cell phones.
iRa Direct, a mobile video surveillance app designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch, lets users remotely maneuver PTZ camera controls and monitor multiple video feeds at once. Both mobile surveillance applications help un-tether security personnel from their monitoring stations, providing a greater physical presence around the monitored area.
Similarly, IQinVision provides applications that clients can upload into a camera. The IQrecorder turns a camera into its own recorder, while IQaccess turns any IQeye camera into a basic access control system.
The ability to upload different software applications not only allows clients to customize according to their surveillance needs, but for small businesses, it saves on installation costs as well.
“What most people buy first is a video camera for surveillance,” Bodell said. “By allowing them at some future point to use that platform to add an app, and just add a piece of hardware attached to the camera, it ultimately makes a lot of installations less expensive.”
SaaS
With the bandwidth of wide area networks growing rapidly -- about 100 percent every 24 months, according to Morgan’s Law -- software as a service, or SaaS, has become a popular technology in the IP security industry.
“If you look at the surveys done by Gartner and IMS, the key reasons for SaaS adoption are lower cost of ownership, flexibility and using [the company’s] operating budget instead of the capital budget to acquire the system,” Van Till said.
SaaS is a software deployment model in which a provider licenses certain applications to customers as needed. In other words, clients would not have to buy the same application multiple times if they want it to be used on more than one device. With SaaS, security personnel can manage activities from a centralized location and can access the application remotely from the Web.
By outsourcing a large part of end users’ IT systems, SaaS gives small to medium-sized businesses access to functionality formerly reserved for large enterprises. Not only that, but the technology helps alleviate some of the problems caused by the high turnover rate on the installer side. Van Till uses Brivo’s OVR WebService, a centralized video storage service, as an example.
“In the case of OVR, clients only need an installer capabable of physically attaching the camera into the wall and then plugging it into a network hub,” Van Till said. “They don’t have to know how to operate a DVR, or know how to integrate it with an access control system, all they have to be able to do is take that Cat-5 network cable, plug it into the cameras and plug it into the switch. Everything else is automatic.”
The Year Ahead
Although the security market will continue to grow in 2010, the recession changed the way businesses operate and the way they look at security.
The key features of IP video -- low installation costs, networkbased security, scalability, remote monitoring -- also reflect where the security industry is moving in general.
Now that more and more installers are embracing IP video, IP will become the defacto infrastructure for all green builds. “I know that there are a lot of people who are hesitant about IP because they think it’s too complex,” Murdock said. “It really isn’t if you have a basic knowledge of networks and IP. And you can install IP video anywhere.”
Technology on the Brink
You can’t help but feel optimistic about 2010 and the security industry when talking to Will Ferris, president of Dotworkz Systems. His enthusiasm is contagious, and his grasp of technology speaks volumes.
“I believe in 2010 we will see IP video become more of a standard than ever before,” said Ferris, whose company was a recipient of Security Products magazine New Product of the Year award. “Highdefinition images will take the place of what you need, rather than what you want. Some of the subsets of IP video will take over what is available today.
“We’re going to see IP video go to the next level in terms of storage, as well as offer drastic changes in outdoor performance and low-light capability. HD video, when put on the network, will provide so much more information than ever before possible. It will open doors by itself.”
With HD video, end users will be able to look at people and see what they are wearing, identify some of the non-verbal cues to see what they might be up to and make out what they are carrying; even tattoos will be distinguishable.
What Ferris is more excited about is how the factor technology plays in the economy. He said that it is technology that will fuel the growth of the security industry and what end users need to have.
Once this new technology is available and deployable, it will begin to replace what’s already in use because end users will see drastic changes and want to be part of it.
“The list will be endless on what IP video will be able to see, including quality and the ease of use going forward,” Ferris said. “We’ll see some drastic changes of what can be done outdoors with network-based video and the higher resolutions.”
If manufacturers are waiting for the economy to turn around, it appears the swing upward has started. The luxuries of IP video are quickly becoming the standard of “must haves.” |
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Network-Centric Security.