PTZ Usage Statistics 2011

JH
John Honovich
•Published Jan 23, 2011 05:00 AM
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How many PTZs are actually used? What's normal? These are especially interesting questions as multi megapixel adoption continues to grow. Inside this note, we examine survey results of 100 international integrators on their PTZ usage, reviewing a variety of important PTZ statistics.

To start, let's look at a histogram below which breaks down results by the frequency of integrator responses - the taller the bar, the more integrators who deploy that percentage of PTZ cameras.

The graph has an overall "L" shape showing that most integrators deploy a quite small percentage of PTZ cameras. However, the bumps near 25%, 50% and 75% show that a small number of integrators deploy heavy amounts of PTZs.

Now, let's take a look at 3 metrics for understanding PTZ adoption:

Here's what those metrics mean:

  • The median integrator deploys PTZs for only 1 out of every 20 cameras. If you randomly approached an integrator, the most likely response would be that only about 5% of all their cameras deployed were PTZs.
  • However, since a small number of integrators deploy large percentages of PTZs, the mean (or average) percentage of PTZs deployed per integrator is higher, at 15%.
  • Overall, we estimate ~20% of all cameras deployed currently are PTZs. The reason why this metric is higher than the others is that integrators who deploy more cameras also deploy a larger percentage of PTZ cameras than average.

Historically, we have heard numbers reported of PTZ use at about 1/4th to 1/3rd of all cameras. Our metric is notably lower than historical numbers. As we examined in our MP / PTZ replacement statistics, we believe this is attributable to increased adoption of multimegapixel cameras in the last few years.

At about 20% of all cameras, PTZ use is still quite significant. However, the results also show that their usage is increasingly limited to larger projects and larger integrators. For instance, the top 20% PTZ users consistently reported their best markets as government, industrial, casinos, etc. So while still a significant portion of the market, the average integrator is unlikely to be using many PTZ cameras at all.