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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.

January 01, 2005 — CSO — What are you looking at? Seriously. What are you looking at with all those video surveillance systems? A parking lot? A customer? A close-up of what's stuffed in the customer's jacket? A warren of cubicles? Rows of blackjack tables? That guy loitering across the street? That employee punching his buddy's time card? Fifteen thousand intermodal shipping containers? One priceless painting? The lobby? The service entrance? Hollywood Boulevard? Widgets on an assembly line? Fire? Traffic? A pack of dingoes ranging near your plant at night? The heat signature of a pack of dingoes ranging near your plant at night? The produce aisle? National monuments? School grounds? The reservoir? Cash tills? Anything that moves?

Actually, we already know. You, intrepid security professionals, are looking at all of that and more. As a tool (and as a cultural phenomenon), video surveillance is in rapid ascent. We've become a nation of conspicuous consumers of surveillance technology: buying cameras, putting them wherever we can, pointing them at whatever we can, and then buying newer cameras. Cheaper ones, higher-resolution ones, tinier ones, digital ones with fantastic gadgetry attached to clever new applications.

The new applications are propelling a surveillance tsunami. If you can look at customers, why not let marketing count them? If you're watching cash tills, why not let HR train new cashiers with that video? If you can see all those shipping containers, why not pass those pictures to logistics? Software tools that do all this have launched video surveillance, catapulting cameras into the corporation and society at large.

It all sounds like a dark echo of the late '90s escalation of the Internet and the dizzy dotcom boom. The only difference is that the optimism of the late '90s, the feeling that anything was possible, has been replaced with the post-9/11 fear that anything's possible. And while optimism evaporates over time, fear takes root; so it's unlikely this surveillance bubble, like the dotcom one, will burst. Joe Freeman, a security industry consultant and president and CEO of J.P. Freeman, predicts that the video surveillance market will expand this year by 17 percent (three times the Labor Department's GDP growth estimate). Freeman and other observers expect sales of newer surveillance technologies, such as networked video and emerging IP-based video, will rise at even faster rates.

But there are lessons to remember from that previous era. Certainly one lesson that holds true is that the faster a new technology is deployed, the less intelligent that deployment seems to be. So watch out for places where decision-makers are camera-happy but not necessarily camera-smart. Amidst the rush to get the latest, most powerful surveillance tools, CSOs need to apply some knowledge, structure and direction, else they run the risk of building up inefficient, ineffective surveillance systems.