Video surveillance, for all its clear benefits, comes with its equal share of barriers: storage limitations, image quality and resolution demands, price concerns, a painfully absent ease-of-use. There’s a whole list. Still, despite the barriers — the hard disk drive (HDD) shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand, and the remaining effects of the first global recession — IP surges forward and enables new offerings, analytics and the cloud are maturing, and new technologies play perfectly into a receptive small-to-medium business market. 2012 is predicted to be a solid, if not great, year of growth for video, and video remains a strong driver of growth for the security industry as a whole.
A research report from Memoori Business Intelligence Ltd, London, points to video surveillance’s strong presence in the security market. “The world security market has grown by 1.5 percent during the last three years, which is remarkable given the poor economic conditions that have prevailed,” the reports states. “The major contributor has been a 7 percent annual aggregate growth in the video surveillance market.