When discussing video storage technologies and products, there are many acronyms and terms that are thrown around. But what, exactly, do they mean?

Today’s megapixel cameras provide a number of benefits, including their ability to enhance situational awareness by expanding areas of coverage with fewer physical cameras, which can also significantly reduce overall costs associated with both equipment and labor.

While camera manufacturers continue to deliver products with higher and higher resolutions, that’s no longer the main goal of video surveillance, purports Laurent Villeneuve, product marketing manager, Genetec, Montreal. Instead, it’s more about expanding the use case for surveillance by increasing end users’ return on investment.

Back when video surveillance relied on tape-based VCRs for recording, deploying these systems was fairly straightforward. You simply connected the camera or cameras directly to the VCR and — voila — everything was captured on tape. Retention depended on how often you wanted to switch out the tape and how much cabinet space you had to store tapes.

There was a time when power and transmission were delivered by distinct solutions, but power over Ethernet (PoE) solutions have changed that dynamic considerably by delivering power and video surveillance signals over a single cable.

Imagine a burglary occurred at a business one afternoon and the suspects escaped capture.

The early struggles of video analytics technologies to live up to over-inflated expectations are well documented.

By now, the benefits of cloud-based video should be quite clear. For starters, moving video to the cloud can reduce or even eliminate the hardware required on a customer’s premises.

Marrying a variety of software and hardware, the goal of a video wall in any operations center or monitoring center is to provide operators with the visual information they need to monitor, assess and respond accordingly to a variety of threats.