Subscriber Discussion

Mobile Camera Market Size?

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Frederick Jacobs
Apr 26, 2018
Visuatech

Does anybody know how big the marked of mobile camera's is in the world? 

I mean camera's running on a battery pack or solar panels, mostly used for city surveillance.

 

 

JH
John Honovich
Apr 26, 2018
IPVM

Frederick, in terms of cameras being run off battery pack or solar panels, the market size is likely quite low. I am not sure if you are looking for revenue or units sold but I would think it's less than 1 out of every 10,000 cameras sold.

Note: I am assuming here, by battery pack, you mean professional cameras, and not consumer offerings like Arlo, which would make the market certainly much bigger, but still relatively small overall.

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Frederick Jacobs
Apr 26, 2018
Visuatech

Thanks for the answer John. I mean the professional solutions instead of Arlo cloud camera's. 

Do you have any idea in terms of total revenue?

 

JH
John Honovich
Apr 26, 2018
IPVM

$100 to $500 million is my guess (world, ex-China). There are not a lot of them overall being used but each camera deployed in this way is typically fairly expensive.

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Frederick Jacobs
Apr 26, 2018
Visuatech

Do you think this number will grow a lot in the coming years?

 

JH
John Honovich
Apr 26, 2018
IPVM

The consumer side is going gangbusters. It's the hottest part of the consumer surveillance market.

Perhaps, that consumer tech will evolve in being useful on the professional side, which would drive growth.

Outside of that, I would think the conventional big battery / big panel professional side will be modest growth.

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Brian Karas
Apr 26, 2018
Pelican Zero

That sounds about right from my experience with these in outdoor/perimeter protection applications.

To be clear, that would be the total amount spent on the complete deployment unit, where the camera itself makes up maybe 10% of the total system cost on average. Much of that money is spent on solar panels, batteries, charging systems, edge recorders, enclosures, mounting hardware, etc.

It is a difficult number to gauge as there are very few commercial offerings, in many cases these are 1-off builds done by integrators who win bids/contracts in various cities.

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Frederick Jacobs
Apr 26, 2018
Visuatech

Are most of the solutions working with recordings on an SD card inside the camera or with a industrial PC build in the houding together with the battery pack?

Any idea?

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Brian Karas
Apr 26, 2018
Pelican Zero

I'm not sure if there is truly a "most".

Mobotix cameras were popular in this application, as they are generally low power and have on-board recording. I have seen these used frequently for "spot" deployments, where customers have a low number of units and the Mobotix software and solution works well enough and keeps the complexity down.

Larger deployments will often have Genetec recorders embedded via a small PC when they do not have the bandwidth for remote recording to a central location. The Genetec federation via the cloud-based Stratocast being a driving factor behind Genetec frequently turning up in these units.

The Avigilon ES cameras have also had some success in this segment. These have on-board SSD storage, so not really SD, but also not using a PC recorder.

We sold many of the VideoIQ iCVR cameras and Rialto devices into this space in the past, where those units had internal HDDs, giving up to 750GB of recording space with VMS-like functionality for the recorded video. Again, not SD and not PC recorders, but kind of in-between.

I think that people still have some justified skepticism over SD cards for long-term operation. However, usability/accessibility of the video has also been a factor. Tight VMS integrations to SD-based storage have not been prevalent, making the experience cumbersome for operators.

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Meghan Uhl
May 01, 2018

 I think its a niche market (construction, special events, law enforcement etc) and always will be but we actually do see quite a bit of growth in the construction niche in Arizona. The construction niche could be growing in direct proportion to the construction market increase which can change at any moment so I'm not sure it can be counted on as a permanent marker of overall market size.  However, if your trying to conduct a forecast for mobile video use in Arizona - the construction market #'s can be a decent guide with a few other metrics thrown in to complete the crystal ball forecast.  There are plenty of construction industry reports on projects and projects sizes so its fairly easy to determine which sites are most likely to use video security to come up with a number.

I think the number of mobile camera applications in general is always going to be very market specific and vary by those markets' ups & downs.  I don't see much of a market in the consumer side unless, as John suggested, you're talking about the Arlos of the world. On the professional/commercial side, those are primarily permanent requirements so mobility and the cost associated with it is not likely to be a big market. 

Where we've seen some commercial use is in things like a parking lot where they are having a temporary problem with theft from cars and just want to catch the guy(s) and then they'll take down the temp video OR, it spurs them to find the $$$ to buy a permanent solution but either way the mobile system loses long term.

I think Utilities, Oil/Pipelines and other industrial applications along with law enforcement may be the best markets for growth and potential for stability of that growth in the mobile video niche.

Getting a handle on the mobile market has been one of our frustrations because the security industry just doesn't talk about it in any depth and the individual niche markets that use it i.e. construction don't talk about it at all.

So....thats my contribution to the discussion.  I hope others will chime in and maybe we can begin to increase the security industry's interest and discussion enough to start establishing some market #'s we can all use :) 

I noticed several more "mobile" exhibitors at ISC West this year, including the UAV/drone market, so hopefully between those of us pursuing this market we can come up with some consensus #'s.  

Thank you to John Honovich and Brian Karas for your input on the subject!

 

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