According to new report from IHS, the world market for banded video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) was worth $790 billion in 2015, a 13.8 percent increase over the previous year. However, the research firm said that the market’s growth was slower than expected and identified a lack of end-user education as the biggest challenge to VSaaS adoption rates.
In a research note, IHS Market Analyst Dominic Williams said that historically, technical hurdles were the biggest barriers to VSaaS adoption and that challenges, such as bandwidth limitations, had previously restricted the number of cameras that could be deployed at a given site. Many of those technological issues have now been adequately addressed within the market but not completely eliminated.
“Bandwidth constraints have not disappeared. However, the situation has improved markedly in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of fiber networks allowing for greater bandwidth, the rise of H.265 and other improved data compression standards, and the ongoing trend toward hybrid data storage, which enables only the most important video data to be uploaded to the cloud thus reducing upstream bandwidth usage,” wrote Williams.
Additionally, as technological barriers have lowered, Williams said a lack of customer awareness has become the most frequently cited challenge to adoption among VSaaS providers.
“VSaaS is still emerging as a technology, and as such the benefits of VSaaS solutions are still being communicated to the video surveillance industry. Lack of knowledge may result in customers misunderstanding not only what VSaaS is, but also its value compared to other solutions,” wrote Williams.
And while awareness of the benefits and power of the cloud is increasing within the industry, Williams said that effectively communicating the features and benefits of VsaaS solutions to the industry and consumers will be essential for success in the market.
“The task of increasing customer awareness will be aided by the marketing resources of Comcast and other large communications companies and ADT and other security companies, which are becoming increasingly involved in the market,” concluded Williams.
Other findings from the IHS Markit Video Surveillance as a Service Report include:
- Hybrid VSaaS solutions (where both onsite and off-site storage is employed) are forecast to grow at the fastest rate from 2015 to 2020. Their increased popularity will be due to a combination of falling costs of cloud storage and increasing prevalence of cameras with on-board storage.
- The residential sector will remain an important market for VSaaS. The increasing involvement of large communication and security companies with large numbers of existing residential subscribers is helping to raise the profile of VSaaS solutions.
