Imagine a warehouse facility. Its integration firm finally convinced them to deploy video surveillance. The cameras were deployed to record a parking lot, a loading dock, and a rear entrance. But what good are cameras if nobody's watching them, the customer asked, and so the feeds were pushed to a monitoring center.

Within minutes, the alarms started. None of them were real.

Tim Pearman has seen this enough times that he can finish the story before it starts. Pearman, who runs Worldview Monitoring, a firm that operates remote guarding on behalf of monitoring centers, gets to see this from the other side of the camera. "A lot of [integrators] come to us who've never done it before, and they just push the camera to us and say, monitor these cameras," he says.

When the nuisance alarms flood in, the central station calls the integrator, and the integrator learns something nobody said before they sold the job: a camera system and a guarding system are not the same thing.

Most of the industry is still figuring that out.

The Market Caught Up

Remote guarding – or proactive video monitoring, or virtual guarding depending on who is selling it – has moved from a specialty offering to something commercial customers now ask for by name. It makes economic sense as guard contracts keep getting more expensive and staff is harder to come by.

Most commercial sites already have cameras, and the technology that once separated vendors, such as detection analytics, is now broadly available and similar across the market.

What actually changed the economics, Pearman argues, was bandwidth. Internet connections at ordinary commercial sites got cheap and fast enough to send video offsite, which put remote monitoring within reach of buildings that were never candidates before.

The timing matters because the pressure on the other end of the equation is also building. After a stint as President of The Monitoring Association, Don Young, CEO of Everon, is no stranger to the benefits and drawbacks of monitoring; in fact, he has overseen the company's launch of an "Active Video Monitoring" offering.

"Cops are just getting flooded," Young says. "We're still at 98% false alarms. The municipalities are going to keep adopting more and more policies that don't respond. You've got to do something to earn that recurring revenue."

Verified response is the answer the industry has settled on. A human operator who watches an incident unfold, identifies it as real, and gives responding officers something to work with before they arrive changes the conversation with law enforcement entirely.

It also changes what the integrator is selling.

Invert the Sale

Pearman's argument is that integrators who have turned to this sales model to guide customers to a video surveillance purchase are inverting the value. "The remote guarding is what you're selling; and you sell a camera system behind it to make sure they've got a great solution," he says.

If an integrator designs the system around the intervention, security improves, the guard bill drops, and calls to the police drop in number. If they design video surveillance to record a scene and then bolt monitoring on afterward, it generally creates problems. Often, a monitoring center ends up asking the integrator to move the cameras because, "we can't see what they want us to see, and we can't stop what they want us to stop," Pearman says.

When selling commoditized surveillance cameras, the revenue math is what ends up getting an integrator's attention. "A small video surveillance installation of 10 cameras is 10 times the RMR or greater of a traditional alarm system," Pearman says. "It's just mathematics."

Larger sites scale from there. A construction trailer is an entry point, he adds; the building behind it will stand for a century, and so can the recurring revenue; but that math only works if the service behind the cameras is worth selling. Pearman says that is where most integrators have work to do.

Two Different Jobs

Pearman has little patience for the idea that selling remote guarding and delivering it are the same skill. An alarm operator can be trained into a video operator, he says, but the two jobs bear little resemblance to each other. "An alarm comes in, they follow a set protocol," he says. "They phone the emergency contacts, they phone the police. There's not a lot of nuance to it. When you have a video monitoring operator, the incident pops up in front of them and they immediately have to look at it, understand it, and start making decisions."

Those decisions are site-specific, and the knowledge behind them accumulates over time. Pearman describes operators who come to know a site's regulars: the cleaning crew that lets itself in at 10, the tenant who steps outside for a cigarette at two in the morning. That familiarity is what tells them, at a glance, when the figure on the lot is someone who does not belong. When that happens, the operator issues a voice-down challenge over the site speaker, calls the responding guard company or the building manager, gets police dispatched, and keeps watching, all at once. On a serious incident, a second operator joins in so one person can make one phone call at a time.

"Sometimes what they see can make a big difference to the officer who's responding," Pearman says. "It can save that officer's life."

Good remote guarding operations require a foundation of process and infrastructure that exists independent of whatever analytics software the central station is running. The analytics are often treated as the differentiator, but Pearman's point is that the real work is in the operational layer underneath: the written SOPs for each site, camera placement chosen for intervention rather than evidence, analytics tuned until nuisance alarms become a manageable handful, redundant connectivity and power, and a trained video operator in the chair on every shift.

That discipline is also Pearman's answer to the argument that AI will soon remove the human from the loop entirely. Software will do more of the sorting, he acknowledges, but the sorting was never the service. The service is the person who decides, in the moment, whether the figure on the screen belongs there, and what to do when they do not.

Know Who Is Behind the Camera

The channel is shifting under all of this in ways that are making some monitoring centers uncomfortable. At least one widely used video platform, long distributed through centers that integrated it and trained on it, now sells directly to integrators. Its integrator app enables an integrator to move a site's cameras to a different central station in about an hour.

Relationships that used to be sticky are becoming portable. Centrals that spent decades as the integrator's trusted partner are now learning what it feels like to be optional. For the integrator, that is leverage, but the point is, if cameras can move between two central stations running the same platform in an hour, the operation is what separates them, not software.

"The whole market is in quite a state of flux," Pearman says. "They've all got different pricing structures. They've all got different software platforms. Some of them require additional hardware to be placed at the site."

Worldview's answer is to stay out of the integrator's direct line of sight. "We stick in our lane. We don't go around installing systems. We work with central stations," Pearman says, adding that in many partnerships the service is white-labeled entirely. The question his position raises is one any integrator should put to any center: Who actually delivers the video service you are selling, and how long has that arrangement been in place? "If you're not confident, the customer is going to feel it and see it in your eyes," he says.

Six Questions Worth Asking

Pearman's frustration with the market surfaces when the conversation turns to experience. He describes meeting central station operators who introduce themselves as 10-year veterans of video monitoring and then, asked how many cameras they watch, say 40. In that case, "you're not an expert at what you do," he says, offering it as a description of the market rather than a knock on any individual. "If you were really great at video monitoring, you'd have 40,000 cameras, not 40 in 10 years."

The questions an integrator should be asking a prospective monitoring center are operational and specific:

1. How many cameras do you actively monitor today, and for how long have you been monitoring them?
2. Who trains your video operators, on what, and how does that differ from alarm operator training?
3. How do you onboard a new site? Who tunes the analytics, and what happens when a camera cannot see what the customer wants watched?
4. Walk me through a live incident at one of my sites. Who does your operator call, in what order, and what does the responding officer know before they arrive?
5. Who covers the chair when an operator is out?
6. How is the service priced, per camera, per event, or per site, and does it require hardware on my customer's premises?

"It's different than selling an alarm," Pearman says. "You need to focus more on the service on the back end rather than the physical product that you're selling."

The cameras, in most cases, are already on the wall. The integrator who understands that is ahead of the conversation. The one who treats remote guarding as an add-on to a camera sale, rather than the reason for it, is setting up the same scene Pearman has watched play out hundreds of times: feeds pushed to a central, nuisance alarms flooding in, and a phone call nobody wanted to make.

The open question for every integrator entering this market is who is on the other end of those cameras, how long they have been doing it, and whether the answer is good enough to stake a customer relationship on.