The three factors are:
1. The flooding in Thailand
As stated in the “2012 – The Turning Points for Spinning Disk”, the flooding in Thailand has significantly impacted the price and supply of hard disk drives (HDD). Whilst steps are underway to restore production, the current situation will likely persist well into 2012.
2. The economic climate
With no immediate resolution to the Eurozone crisis on the horizon, it remains highly likely that the global economic climate will remain turbulent through 2012.
Whilst the video surveillance market is forecast to continue to grow during 2012, IMS Research expects that customers will increasingly look for greater cost efficiencies.
Video surveillance storage is one area that may be examined. However, due to legislation or other governing factors, it may not be viable for users to simply reduce the volume and/or quality of video that they record.
3. The growth of HD and megapixel network cameras
The market for HD and megapixel network cameras is forecast to continue to grow strongly,despite adverse economic conditions. In 2012, shipments are forecasts to increase by more than 70%, compared with the previous year.
Whilst the accelerated proliferation of high resolution security cameras provides end-users with benefits, such as greater clarity when viewing live video, the storage costs can be significant due to the larger file sizes.
The increasing amount of high definition video, coupled with decreasing (albeit short term) availability of storage and a greater demand for cost efficiencies, could prove to be a driving force for the industry to transition to more efficient video compression codecs.
Some of the potential compression formats include:
H.264 SVC – Whilst there are many different variants of H.264 available in the market, the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) variety, despite being well established in other industries, is still not commonplace in the video surveillance industry. The key benefits of the SVC variant include a reduction in bandwidth (leading to a reduction in storage requirement) and dynamically resizable video.
WebM – An open and royalty free video compression format based upon VP8. It is debatable whether WebM is more efficient or performs better than H.264. However, WebM is optimized for HTML5 video, which could be a key consideration in VSaaS applications. The current stumbling block for its use in video surveillance is that WebM currently does not have an associated real-time streaming protocol.
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) – HVEC is still under development and is seen to be the evolution of H.264, providing increased compression efficiency. Ratification of this new standard is not scheduled until late 2012/early 2013.
So what will happen in 2012? It would be fair to say the video surveillance industry is not on the cutting edge of technology advancements in video compression. MPEG4, Wavelet and JPEG2000 are all still widely used and H.264 is sometimes still referred to as “new”.
As H.264 SVC is essentially an extension of H.264, it is the most viable alternative in the short-term and we expect more video surveillance products with support for H.264 SVC to be launched in 2012.
Longer term, HEVC is perhaps the most likely successor to H.264, but that will depend on just how much better it performs and its suitability for video surveillance applications.
To receive the full PDF version of this white paper, please click here.