Roundtable contributor Tom Galvin is principal of NetVideo Consulting, and former VP of engineering for GE Security and former VP of product development for Verint-Loronix.

Vlado Damjanovski is an Australian CCTV expert and lecturer, and author of the book "CCTV." He is involved in standards for surveillance in Australia and closely watching international standards activities.

Roundtable participant John Honovich is founder of IPvideomarket.info and an analyst on the network video industry. He formerly worked with 3VR and Sensormatic.

As the weather turns cold and we reach the fourth quarter of 2008, it's clear that one of the big themes in video surveillance for 2008 has been "standards". With adoption in IP video and a boom in the number of capture and recording device manufacturers and video management system vendors, the time was probably ripe for standards to start appearing.

And while we sometimes become very U.S.-centric, these standards weren’t just a push in North America. Sure, in the U.S., you saw the roll-out of the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA) network video API. But in Germany this month, the Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF) kicked off at Essen, opening its membership to the entire industry. And there’s reportedly strong standards activity in Australia as well as the UK in relation to video surveillance.

To help us sort out what this interest in and work towards standards all means, we reached out to three video surveillance experts.

To do so, we got in touch with Tom Galvin, principal of the firm NetVideo Consulting Inc. Galvin is the former vice president of engineering at GE’s security division and the former vice president of product development for Verint-Loronix. He is also a regular contributor to Security Dealer & Integrator and Security Technology & Design magazines (sister publications of SecurityInfoWatch.com).

Also on hand to give the low down on standards was John Honovich, founder of IPVideoMarket.info and author of the book, “Security Manager's Guide to Video Surveillance”. John is the former director of product management for 3VR Security and was general manager for Sensormatic Hawaii. He is also a regular contributor on topic of IP surveillance to IPSecurityWatch.com and SecurityInfoWatch.com.

Finally, to balance us out and give us the world perspective, we reached out to Vlado Damjanovski of CCTV Labs Inc. Vlado is an Australian-based trainer and lecturer on CCTV and author of the book CCTV (Elsevier Butterwoth-Heinemann publishing) which has often been called "The CCTV Bible".

The roundtable with these three CCTV thought leaders appears below:

Is the time now ripe for standards in network video, or should this push for network video standards have happened sooner?