The Evolution of Video Surveillance – Digital CxO Podcast EP98

Hello, and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani and I'm excited to be here today with Frederick Nelson. He is the VP of America's for Access Communications.

How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Amanda. Thanks for having me here today from beautiful Boston, Massachusetts.

Wonderful. Happy to have you on our show. So can you share a little bit about Access Communications?

What services do you provide? Absolutely. So Access Communications, we are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year.

And back in 1996, we invented the world's first IP-based camera that later made us focus on the security surveillance market. 7 billion global company. And that enjoys partnership and, and customers with a lot of the large Fortune 55 hundreds here in the Americas.

If you're not in this space, you probably never heard about us. If you're in this space, you're gonna start looking at security and surveillance cameras everywhere and see our little brand there. Awesome.

Well, congratulations on your success. So video surveillance has come a long way. It's been quite the evolution.

So can you maybe share a little bit about the beginning of video surveillance to where we are now? Yes, absolutely. And I think it can be divided up in a couple of distinct phases.

It really started off predominantly in the banking and, and casino space that needed various surveillance back in the eighties and early nineties where it was typically analog cameras with limited resolution and a lot of other limitations as well connected to VCR, the VCRs that we all used to have at home, at least all people like myself used to have at home for viewing, um, videos and, and and uh, movies and so forth. A little bit later, end of nineties, it started to move over to digital recording called DVR Digital Video Recorder is still connecting to those an analog cameras. The next trend, which was as I mentioned before, innovated by access with the world's first IP camera was to put all the intelligence and all the compressions out to the edge, sort of an IOT device and do it there and then stream it over the internet to record on a server that could be located, um, at the facility or somewhere else as well to provide a lot of benefits when it comes to the scalability of the system and so forth.

And that was kind of the fourth phase of it surveillance that, um, was happening from mid two thousands to 2015. Most system was kind of, uh, uh, phased over to digital or IP based cameras from the analog ones. And the next phase we have today is the recording solution and video management solutions are more and more moving over from on-prem onto the cloud based on great compression, uh, and so forth.

Um, so that is kind of the phase where now a lot of recordings, a lot of video management is still on premise, uh, but it's more and more for some businesses and application like schools and smaller retailers started to move into the cloud. And then what we are excited about for the future, which we can chat a little bit, uh, later, is the ability to do more with that video, uh, IE using it with analytics or ai. So instead of doing forensics on recorded video to be more proactive and intentional with how the video is, is used both for security surveillance as well as, um, business intelligence for different businesses.

So that's kind of how, how the industry has progressed. And I think we all seen, um, we've all all seen on TV or sometimes when, when a child is being abuc abducted, you see grain, the video from a gas station. That's really the old system.

That's what not what they look today. And then you've seen the other movies, the CSI type with a zoom in indefinitely on a picture from anywhere in the world. Uh, that's the other real reality that doesn't exist.

We're somewhere in the middle, uh, in the video security industry today. That's interesting that you shared that. So, so that other reality isn't, we aren't quite there yet.

It's getting, I wouldn't say close depends on what you look at, but it's getting, uh, really a lot better and accelerating over the last couple of years. If you look over the innovations over the years, I, I talked about the IP and putting everything on the edge kind of an iot approach that started on some 20 years ago. One driving technology in the early days was power over ethernet, which meant that you need one cable to each of the cameras instead of power in the video cable.

You can use one and and attach it anywhere in the building and easily route it back to the server room. Um, the other ones over the air was better and better compression. There was compression the advent of H 2 64 consumer grade compression that we started to use in the 2008, 2009.

And then a couple years later we started to, we implemented something we call zip screen, which is really compressing it even harder because security cameras generate a lot of video. And with that we could start increased resolution without overloading the network. We're overloading the servers with video recorder.

4 megapixel to the latest camera we just launched, uh, a couple of months ago. It's 41 megapixel. And just as a reference, you can have a large open air stadium and you can zoom in on the other side of the stance and see people clearly and the color of the clothing and what kind of, um, hat they have on and, and those kind of things.

So are we not a hundred percent there. The improvements over the last 10 years have been immense in this space as well when it comes to quality and what we can do with the systems. So what else needs to be done to have that sort of, uh, born movie type, uh, completely world connected surveillance where you can just zero in all over the world?

What else is needed there? So, uh, we need more cameras and we are happy to provide them, but joking apart, there's a lot of cameras. If a look in the United States, I saw a number that there's close to 100 million cameras.

We have 330 million people here. Um, but I think the, the key thing that we need is we talked about how the cameras have better resolution, they also have better light sensitivity today because in a lot of areas when it's dark at night, um, a lot of the band guys happen to do things when it's dark because they think they're covered by that, the cameras. There was also an innovation that we came out with, uh, 6, 7, 8 years ago called Light Finder, where basically even when it's pitch dark and you and I can't necessarily see the camera can see because it has this extremely low light sensitivity with the sensor and how we process the video so you can see things at night.

So that is also getting us closer to the born, uh, kinda CSI, um, perception of what cameras can do. Uh, the the next thing as well is to have the ability to use the video for something, uh, to have the cameras be more intelligent as well. We say now the cameras can see better than the human eye.

Now how do we make them be smarter than the human brain? And of course it won't keep up with all our lovely intelligence, but when it comes to certain things like detecting objects, detecting cars, detecting colors of cars, license plates, they're really becoming very, very accurate and very good. And if you think about the a hundred million cameras, one of the challenges, who's gonna look at all this video and most of the video that is recorded today is just thrown away 30 days later.

9% is just thrown away. It's backed up if something happens. But if that video can be used for being more proactive for security and surveillance and even better if it can also be used for business operations for retailers, for airports, for, uh, logistics companies, for data centers, now all of a sudden all those cameras are providing a lot more value for the uses of, of them and can take over some of the mundane and repetitive tasks that we have humans doing today.

So I think that's really the next progression of video security surveillance that we see now and that we see happen quite rapidly since the advent of deep learning processing all the way out in the edge, which only really happened two, three years ago. The other question I have is do you think we ever will actually have that fully connected, um, type of system? And if so, are there some regulations needed with that when we talk about privacy concerns and things like that?

That that is a great questions. Um, first of all, I think it's important to think about privacy and regulation and ethical use of video security and video surveillance. And when we talk about, uh, ai, there is something that came outta Europe earlier this year called the a EU AI Act, how AI can be used and not used, uh, which we, we really like because they, instead of looking at different technologies and say, facial recognition cannot be used, they look at different use cases instead and say there is low risk, medium risk and high risk applications.

So when you and I go through, um, the customs control at the US airport, and if you're signed up with a global entry, you volunteer that biometric information to the US customs, which they have anyway because you have the picture in the passport. Uh, you can get in without showing any papers because they recognize you. They might need a fingerprints as well, but typically yes, with a face, we all enjoy that and like that when it comes to social scoring in a c event, city surveillance applications where they monitored people faces and see who, who is jaywalking over the crosswalks and then find you directly without anyone being there.

We don't necessarily love those applications, which happens in some categories. So I think there's a lot of regulation in that space that all serious vendors need to comply to. There's also, when we talk about ai, um, which is really improving very, very quickly as you know also with a Gen I applications, but also when it comes to image recognition, uh, we need to be careful how or anyone who's implementing those solutions need to be careful how the video and how the algorithms and how the models are being trained, what data they're being trained on.

And there are some cases where companies have not, uh, followed the policy of how they can train the video and they've been fined, you know, hun uh, tens of millions of dollars by the government because they're not using it in an ethical way. And then to your question as well, when it comes to privacy, that's of course something that there is regulation, the regulation cha uh, is different between different countries. And it's also the expectations of being surveilled and not surveilled.

If you go into a retail store, there's an expectations of having surveillance cameras. If you go into a casino, there's an expectations of being surveilled. If you go into a bathroom or a changing room, there's expectation not being sur surveilled as well.

So there's some level of pri privacy, uh, to to, to cut things, um, in a simple way. I think in general also, when it comes to privacy, as much as we all love privacy, as long as you trust the other side that doing the security and surveillance, if that's the city of Boston or, or, or the state of Texas or or an an airport, I, I don't think most people are concerned. I've seen surveys when they, when they ask people, uh, understanding what various security and surveillance can do today, how many people accept that they're out in, in the public space.

And, um, it's typically in, in the high seventies and eighties of people having the expectation and accepted that it's there because it has more benefits than, than not. But of course we all cared about the privacy as well, and there are regulations around that When we look to cameras as a solution. I do have another question about, uh, the integrity of the actual technology.

How safe are the cameras and how costly is it to keep the cameras in good condition and actively working properly? That, that is another great question and that kind of ties into both having the camera working properly and the dev and the developments happening very fast today when it comes to the capabilities of the cameras, both when it comes to the resolution and the image quality, but most, most importantly when it comes to the analytics or AI that we can do in the cameras today, but then also when it comes to cybersecurity, and if you think about the large airport with 5,000 cameras or a retailer with a thousand locations and 40 cameras in each location, you do the math, this might be the highest vulnerability from a cybersecurity perspective that they have of any technology implemented. And as we come from an industry that used to implementing a closed off system with an analog network to the IP world, it's important that we spend a lot of time and effort to educate the both installers and integrators as well as the end customer, how important it is to look at this from a cybersecurity perspective.

And with, with a lot of equipment, there is a policy on the IT side to keep to update those every five years because of technology and software support that is not yet happening in the security industry. And I think it has to get there to be able to, to fully say these are cyber secure because they do get updated every five years and have the latest software, latest framework, uh, and, and the hardware that can cope with the latest patches as well. From a cyber perspective, I'm not saying they're not cyber secure, but often they need to be on a closed off network behind the firewall because of these limitations.

And if you really want to use the full, uh, advantages of the cloud and, and ai, we need to tie them into to larger systems and also making sure they're updated for cybersecurity. Absolutely. Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be?

I think the key takeaways, and I can choose two yes because of that, is that, uh, cameras are basically everywhere today. They're really providing great value for the users and also the patrons of, or the customers of the retails and, and, and airports in running those operations very, very effectively. And also those cameras and security systems are going from being relatively dumb cameras that you can look at the video after the fact to be very smart IOT devices that can, a lot of things to provide more efficient, uh, operations and more e enjoyable environments for the customers and patrons of, of those facilities.

All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you for coming on our show and sharing your insights with us.

Thanks So much for having me, Ananda. All right. And thank you to our audience.

Stay tuned. There's more.