Amidst market confusion, purveyors seek to differentiate self monitoring, video verification, professional video monitoring By Matt Wickenheiser A few months ago, G4S began referring to its video monitoring service as “remote guarding.” It may not seem like a big change, but in fact it represents an effort several companies in this space are making to [...]

YARMOUTH, Maine—In an IP world, where advances in technology lead to more frequent improvements in the cloud and better hosted services, it’s getting easier for dealers to differentiate and make more RMR through offering video surveillance and monitoring. As video becomes less of a rare specialty or self-contained CCTV system and more of a de rigueur, a la carte offering, is there any push for a category for standards listing? Is there a real need for such a category, or will IP-based video monitoring remain an unregulated niche of a few high-tech, specialized, video-monitoring firms?

IP technology has been “coming” to security—mostly accompanied by fanfare—for a while. As numerous reports have made clear, IP opens up all kinds of new opportunity for the security industry in the form of new services and added value for the end user—both of which translate to more revenue. It also, however, opens up new worlds of complexity and expense in the form of new infrastructure needed, more training for personnel, and the convergence of security and IT.