We want your help choosing want term we should use to describe cameras in our industry.
Historically, we have used either IP camera or surveillance camera. However, there have been two recent trends that impact this:
- HD analog is for real, and is already fairly significantly and capturing share from IP and SD analog. In the past, we could ignore SD analog because it was in decline and not technologically competitive but HD analog is different. So we need a term to describe all cameras in our industry, not just IP.
- The term 'surveillance' has really taken a negative connotation due to government surveillance (monitoring emails, text messages, phone calls, etc.) that have nothing to do with our industry.
Here is what Google shows for trends across those 4 terms. Note the terms searched were 'IP camera', 'Security camera', 'CCTV camera' and 'Surveillance camera':
Interestingly, the term 'IP camera' has gained substantially over the past decade and is now the most frequently searched for of the group. Security camera is a close second.
We'll obviously continue to use IP camera for IP cameras but we need to pick a more general term when talking about all cameras, so is it security, cctv or surveillance?
What do you think we should use?
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