Video surveillance industry bucks the trend.

(From Network Computing Asian Edition)

Byline: Oo Gin Lee

Terrorist activity and incidents have resulted in companies and government institutions re-evaluating their video surveillance systems. Because of this, the video surveillance industry is bucking the downturn trend in the IT industry, said Dennis Li (below), president and chief operations officer of Hong Kong-based MultiVision, a video surveillance technology provider.

Quoting statistics from Freeman Associates, Li said that before 911, the CCTV market was initially expected to grow from about US$5 billion in 2001 to over US$6 billion in 2005. But with heightened awareness of security post 911, the market is now expected to reach about US$10 billion by 2005.

And the maturity of several technologies has made it the right time for companies to move their video surveillance systems to the digital age, he added. Li said that five key factors that make digital video surveillance a compelling solution have matured and are now easily available. They are fast CPUs for video compression, stable OSes, low cost storage, broadband network availability, and the emergence of the MPEG-4 compression standard.

Because MPEG-4 compresses video more effectively than the popular MPEG-1 standard, recording and transmitting MPEG-4 files is more attractive without any significant loss in quality, Li added. At 20 frames per second, a MPEG-4 stream needs a transmission bandwidth of about 500Kbps, compared to the 1.8Mbps required by MPEG-1. ?Basically, it?s less storage and less bandwidth,? he explained.

And the industry is fast adopting this new standard. ...