There's a relatively new trend where IP camera manufacturers are offering SW developers easy SDKs to integrate their applications into their HW or VMS (most big IP camera manufacturers acquired a leading VMS provider in the past 2 year).
This should provide a win-win situation where manufacturers provide superior offerings, SW developers get market access and relatively easy product integration and users are able to choose from a wide variety of applications.
I have 2 questions:
1. how do the SW developers earn from all this?
a. Do they need to sell the cameras to users
b. Do they make a profit with each application installment (app store business model)? is so, how will it be priced?
c. Do they get a percentage of the sale made by the camera manufacturer or VMS provider? if so what are the customary percentage?
2. Is it fair to say that over the next 1-2 years we will see a trend of camera manufacturers buying video analytics companies to gain an edge over the competition just as they did with VMS providers over the past 2 years.