Jun 24, 2009 8:26 AM,

The IP video surveillance opportunity | Part Four: Hurdles

By Ed Gubbins

IP video surveillance presents managed service opportunities for telecom service providers, whose equipment suppliers are already landing government customers

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Two different industry groups began addressing the standards issue last year: the Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF), led by Sony, Axis and Bosch Security; and the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA), led by Cisco Systems, IBM, Texas Instruments and others. Having posted its first application programming interface (API) for cameras, encoders and digital video recorders last September, PSIA held its first developers’ meeting in March. And ONVIF introduced a test tool for its first specification in May.

But even with two groups racing for the same prize, widely adopted standards aren’t expected anytime soon.

“I don’t think they’ll be in place until, if they’re very fortunate, sometime in 2010,” Schatt said. Others say it could take two to four years.

The PSIA is perhaps the more ambitious of the two groups, Schatt said, and Cashman believes the router giant behind it, which has tied its future to video in everything from high-end telepresence systems to low-end Flip cameras, has a unique potential to influence the space.

“We see [Cisco] as an interesting leading indicator of where this industry’s going,” Cashman said. “They’ll be in a position to really kind of drive the standardization on the equipment side and lift the applications out of the hardware and be able to monitor various devices and cameras on one integrated platform.”

For suppliers and service providers that have already begun to tap the market, it’s not hard to imagine an explosion of creative service possibilities that could result once a variety of different equipment types can be accessed consistently and seamlessly through standards-based technology.

“Because of the capabilities of management suites and software applications to drive distributed network and control management solutions, the demand for standardization is greater than ever,” said Mark Novak, commercial director for Vigilant Technology, an IP video vendor partnered with sister company Telco Systems. “Movement toward the standard will possibly be painfully slow, but it’s inevitable we’ll get there.”