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Video Surveillance Systems: Reality TV

The reasons to invest in new video surveillance systems are everywhere. Zoom in on these six insights to help you focus on what's important and what's just hype.

"We've created our own problems," says consultant Sandra Jones, who specializes in video technology and security services. "We've done a great thing by making cameras cheaper and better. And because of that, they've proliferated. But that's also a trap."

The challenge is not what you can do; you can do almost anything, Jones says. "The challenge is how well you do it," she says. "How do you make surveillance useful? So that you're not asked in five years, or whenever the surveillance system fails you: Why did we spend all this money again?"

It's the CSO's job to get in front of this before, not after, buying into the surveillance hype. To help, we've scanned the hallways and perimeters of the field. Here's what we see.1 Take It Easy with New Technologies Despite all of the mad growth in new video technology, CSOs are getting conflicting advice on how to deploy it.

That's because while the newer technologies (networked and IP-based video surveillance) are on the rise, they still split the market roughly 50/50 with the old-guard, standalone closed circuit TV (CCTV) systems, according to Freeman.

Video surveillance is in that awkward moment of its life that the music industry was in around the early '90s when cassettes and CDs sold equally, even though everyone knew that, eventually, the superior CD would drive cassettes into extinction. Just as digital video will surely wipe out CCTV.

It's still early for CSOs to know exactly how to proceed, says Dave Kent, CSO of biotech company Genzyme. "Not a lot of people are tuned to [IP-video surveillance's] versatility yet, but it's inevitable," Kent says. Still, no one knows precisely when that inevitability becomes reality.

Because of that uncertainty, CSOs are getting conflicting advice. Darryl Marshall, a technology systems integrator who deployed digital video surveillance system for Dreams, a bed and mattress retail chain in Great Britain, observes, "The old CCTV guys tend to downplay the current viability of digital and networked IP-video, while the digital guys hype you into buying too much, or something that's not ready, or something that doesn't fit into your environment."

Thus, CSOs are caught in a pickle, between getting less than they could and more than they need, a dilemma complicated by the fact that surveillance technology is progressing over three phases:

Phase 1: Standalone CCTV systems. Relative dinosaurs, but sturdy and simple. They will fade as surely as typewriters did.

Phase 2: Hybrid digital-analog systems. Sometimes networked, they use black-box digital video recorders (DVRs, essentially TiVo boxes). Represents the transition between old and newsuch as those word processors that came after typewriters, but before PC programs.