Video Surveillance at Home
I got an email earlier today with an interview request from a Baltimore newspaper that was covering ADT’s Videoview system for residential video surveillance. I sent the reporter these thoughts, but I wanted to share them with our readers. In sum, residential video surveillance is an enormous growth area for our industry, and here are a few of my thoughts on what is needed and what will come down the pipe…
I don’t think there is anything brand new about this, but what I think products like Safewatch Videoview from ADT get right is that they make it easy on the customer to get the visual information they want from their home when they can’t be there. One upside to something like Safewatch is that this pulls together what otherwise might be a lot of disparate systems. For years, there were baby room monitors sold separately, plus driveway monitors sold separately, even small surveillance cameras that many years ago would tie-in with a homeowner’s VCR system. With the Video View platform, these kind of systems are all integrated together; making all of that data available from each point. That kind of functionality has been available for years in the commercial market, but it’s significant that this kind of technology is making its way into the residential world.
An additional strength on this equipment is that users can tie it in with an alarm system so if a burglar sensor like a motion detector is tripped, it can send a video clips of what the nearest camera saw. Secondly, the system supports remote access, which is vital in today’s mobile, on-the-go world. Frankly, remote access to video should really be a pre-requisite for any homeowners considering video security at a residence. What good is a system for video recording if you can’t access the video from your office to know that your daughter just made it home from school safely?
These kind of professional residential video surveillance products are taking off first in high-end homes and at second homes/vacation homes. However, as prices drop and as residential security systems installers become more familiar with video surveillance, you’re going to see products like this become much more commonplace.
The one thing our industry will have to overcome will be privacy concerns. Many homeowners will not feel comfortable having cameras around them at all times. Additionally, despite the secure transfer of this data over the web with password protection to view it, I think people still will wonder how secure their online video connections are, or whether someone could access their system.
What is next for this type of stuff? I think you’re going to see more security companies develop similar packages and use platforms like this – and they will offer web-access to video information plus web access of other home data. Not only would you be able to get the video footage, but while you’re online, you could check your temperature on your programmable thermostat; check to see that your alarm system is armed, see a log of alarm system data (when it was armed, who armed it), maybe even adjust the schedule on a programmable yard sprinkler system. In the future, I see some of these businesses moving from security monitoring into the broader arena of home services monitoring.
-Geoff
Dear Sir,
I am an analyst, working with the Smart Cube, a business reserach and consulting firm.
I am currently doing a study on home security cameras. I have gone through your article on “Video Surveillance at Home”. I was wondering if you could throw some light on the current market size (ballpark estimates)of the US or global market for residential video cameras, pricing trends, and any technological advancements.
Thanks & regrads
Hemant Saigal
The Smart Cube
(M): +91 9811439315
(0): 91 11 40508200 Ext: 202
Hemant, that’s not as easy as it sounds (even to ballpark). The challenge is, of course, that many video cameras in homes right now are self-installed using the kind of low-end systems you can buy at Wal-Mart or the big box home improvement stores. It’s further challenged by the fact that there’s not a way to trace where cameras that manufacturers make are ending up — i.e., if someone purchases one of these self install cameras, you have no clue whether they’re using it at a business, farm, home, etc. Additionally, professionally installed cameras are installed by security installing dealers, who may know in their business roughly how many cameras they put into residential environments vs. those installed in commercial or governmental spaces, but you’d have to be able to ask each and every dealer to get any sort of accurate number.
Suffice to say the market is quite large, and I would say that right now, high-end homes are prime markets for professionally installed equipment. Probably the best way to get a handle on that would be to estimate the number of wealthy households and list that as a potential audience. Certainly some companies (such as the one mentioned in this blog post) would probably have some perspective on market size.
Regarding pricing trends, point the arrow down as the guts that were hard to create five years ago (things like dynamic range and technology to help balance the camera in troublesome lighting conditions) are now rolling off the assembly lines at chip manufacturers.
As far as technological advancements, take a look at our CCTV page (under the “Products” tab on the homepage) and read through the “announcements” and “products” subsections, where you’ll find out all about what manufacturers are doing today in as far as pushing the technology. However, I’ll give you a hint — they’re rapidly moving from coaxial connections to IP (network) connections such as your PC uses.
C’mon Guys:
Sure you can go to the “big box” people and I’m sure they could come up with some $$$ magic and get you for the monthly’s that both sustain and create that RMR to sell down the road, but a LOW(ER) COST SYSTEM can be both designed and be very functional at the same time with existing technology, I do it all the time-it’s not rocket science. The problem is these guys/gal sales people just don’t have either the experience or knowledge to fall back on nor does the company allow products to be use outside of their scope of choices.
Dear Sir,
Thanks a lot.
Your insights very very useful for our study.
Thanks & regrads,
Hemant Saigal
The Smart Cube
(M): +91 9811439315
(0): 91 11 40508200 Ext: 202
ADT puts out some nice home security systems, with the SafeWatch system being at the top of the list.
You raise an interesting issue of security of the security system with so much wireless hacking going on. This is an issued that cannot be taken for granted as precautions must be taken to insure outside access is not possible. Online access maybe another vulnerability but having that as a feature adds another dimension of customer satisfaction.
regards,
Donnie Manuel
I need more information about cost, where to buy and is it easy to install?.
Family system, a computer or a simple LAN, used to be just out-bound connection node, from which family users initialize only out-going requests to download music, upload pictures or just surf web.
But things changed recently with the embedded system evolution and IP based service expansion. The family system starts to take in-bound connection to handle requests. Typical application for such in-bound connection can be found in P2P games, VIOP and IP video surveillance.
Take IP video surveillance as example, a web server running in an embedded device and server the in-coming request for real time video, snapshot, recorded images or administration tasks. Service is supposed to be more vulnerable than non service application because it will open more ports and take in information from outside, which can be malicious.
An embedded device running open service such as ftp, web deployed in family environment can impose great security threat on regular family users. The reasons can be briefly summed as following:
1. Family system is the least protected end point in the WWWW world. No professional system admin, no commercial grade firewall, no password and security policy.
2. Family users are regulars users without much knowledge how to protect their network, and how to detect the attack.
3. Most services running in embedded system are implemented loosely without security in the first place
4. For an embedded system, the end to end connection channel protection is impossible. The standard SSL just does not work for embedded system, the reason for that SSL related to Domain name and there is impossible to deploy SSL certificate in embedded system with a dynamic IP address, also there is no one will pay and renew certificate after the device is shipped.
No matter how an IP camera brag its security feature, it can be very easily to be tampered if somebody really want to, because if there is no protection in the whole transportation channel, the device is regarded no protection. Same for other embedded device with open services running.
However, the security flaw for embedded is not really this significant as it sounds. The reason is the limited ability for an embedded system, because a tampered embedded system won’t be harmful as a desktop system.