[Editor's Note: Commenter is executive at VideoIQ.]
Car dealerships are one of our key markets. I've lost count of how many we have, but it's hundreds, if not thousands at this point.
There are actually a lot of large and small centra stations that do video event monitoring these days, we have a list of some of our key parters here.
"Cost" can be an issue for the central station, but only indirectly. Many will tell you that they can make far more on video event monitoring (and really, incident prevention through the monitoring) than on traditional alarm monitoring, but they also have to understand that event handle times can be several minutes, not a dozen seconds.
A key component that we have seen is an ability for the remote central station to also respond in real-time, via an audio talk-down. Simple video-verified events, or video-motion based events are not as effective, though they WILL help reduce false alarm fees if you dispatch police to the scene. Many of our central stations reports success rates around 90% in terms of using the live audio talk-down to actually deter/prevent theft/vandalism, not just verify it.
False alarms of course can be an issue. It's hard (I'd actually say near impossible) to give "always applicable" guidelines, but generally speaking, false alarms should be measured in the single digits, or low 10's of events per site per week. This is going to vary based on the overall site/scene, quality of installation (lighting, etc.) and other basic factors.
Most of the central stations monitoring our equipment are also highly skilled in tweaking rule configs to help the customer get the desired outcome... For example they might adjust a Region of Interest or change a rule sensitivity level or something like that to help adapt the system to performance.
Pricing models vary. Some charge a flat rate (plus overages) based on site profile, some charge per event, some "bucket" events into pricing tiers (1-50 events/mo. is $200, 50-150 is $300, etc.) some charge fractional hours of operator time used to handle an event. Handling policies and complexities of the response protocol are often different among different monitoring stations, some optimize for cost, some optimize for a fully-managed solution.