It is time to change from CCTV surveillance to IP surveillance.

Just as major technological shifts have impacted the music and telecommunications industries and the corporate setting, a major shift is now also happening in the physical security and video surveillance markets.

Video surveillance emerged as a viable market about 30 years ago, and the technology has matured year after year. The introduction of the digital video recorder (DVR) in the mid-1990s started to clear a path for a digital solution, but it was really a replacement for the VCR (videocassette recorder) and multiplexer. The DVR combined two products into one and added the benefits of digital recording, but it was still a box with analog inputs that simply recorded. New vendors entered the market but buyers did not change, and sales channels remained the same. The DVR signified an evolution in technology — not a revolution.

After a few years, DVRs were equipped with a communication interface that enabled the retrieval of recorded or live video from a remote location.

Initially, the interface was a standard serial port that connected to a phone modem, but eventually it became an Ethernet port, requiring the first collaboration with the IT department. However, for the most part, security systems within an organization operated under the radar of CEOs and CIOs.

In 1996, the world’s first network camera saw the dawn of light. That camera was the AXIS 200 , a camera that could send a small resolution image at one frame per second and four frames per minute if one wanted full resolution. The AXIS 200 was a product that was poised to replace and overtake the Web camera market for remote monitoring and Web attraction applications. For security applications, however, that camera was far from sufficient. Fast-forward a few years and the network camera had evolved significantly. It could deliver 30 frames per second, had built-in video motion detection, and had an image quality that was similar to analog cameras. All of a sudden, cameras were deployed for security purposes.

Back in 1996, most networks were 10-Mbit networks, and just the thought of putting surveillance video on those networks was unthinkable.

By the year 2000, 100-Mbit networks were commonplace, and by 2007, a common enterprise-class, 48-port network switch enabled Gigabit performance on every port and had the ability to stream video from thousands of network cameras at full frame rate via the 10-Gigabit backplane.

Remember that Moore’s law is still prevailing and technology development happens very fast — yesterday’s bottlenecks might become tomorrow’s opportunities.

Because of the open interface in the IT industry, independent software companies that build applications for video management started to emerge in Germany, the United States, Spain, Denmark, Japan, and Canada — essentially all over the globe. A new market was starting to take shape: the network video market.