For real-world performance, VSaaS is lagging far behind on-prem video
2021-07-20

Jeff Montoya, Eastern Regional Sales Director, IDIS America

In our last blog, we looked at the cost advantages that NVR-based on-prem video solutions have over VSaaS.

Despite all the marketing hype around VSaaS, the established on-prem model offers better value in key areas including lower storage costs and fairer, more transparent pricing models without prohibitive ongoing license fees that can soon mount up.

The advantages don’t stop there. Now let’s look at performance.

For many video users, performance can be as important as cost, indeed for applications where security is mission-critical, it’s usually even more so. Poor image capture, latency, and blinds-spots can not only leave gaps in security, but they can also lead to critical and even life-threatening incidents being missed, liability and non-compliance claims, and the inability to prosecute criminals. 

By focusing on challenges at specific market sectors over the years – from busy city centers, malls, and school districts to remote desert sites through to manufacturing plants, logistics loading bays, and upscale hotels and boutiques - leading video vendors have found solutions to all these performance issues. But VSaaS providers have come from a different place – from the IT sector - and so far, while they understand cloud, they haven’t solved or shown a true understanding of these real-world challenges for a majority of security and safety applications.

Take the choice of cameras. VSaaS providers generally offer customers a limited range because their unique selling point is edge storage, and this makes it hard to offer high-definition video capture coverage even at straightforward sites, let alone more challenging locations.

For example, IR cameras are a basic requirement at most locations, because high quality, crisp, clear video capture is needed even in darkness and changing light conditions.  In general, VSaaS suppliers don’t offer a good choice of IR models and that means end users will need to implement additional lighting.

The same goes for WDR (wide dynamic range) which is essential for cameras to cope with variable lighting conditions, and extremes of light and dark - everything from the glare of vehicle headlights to sunlight flooding in through a loading bay door, to the dappled light in classrooms and brick-and-mortar retail.

Without these features that most security operatives now take for granted – specialist IR technology at night that can produce full-color image capture, or high-performance WDR as standard - your system quality will take a dive back through time to the bad old days when grainy, unreliable footage that made it impossible to identify suspects or prevent crime by quickly detecting, verifying, and responding to suspicious behavior.

And there’s a full range of cameras available to solve specific user challenges in almost every type of location, including powerful PTZs for wide outdoor coverage, anti-ligature models for use in correctional facilities and mental healthcare settings, explosion-safe units for industrial sites, pinholes for ATMs, ruggedized models for transportation, and discrete and compact cameras for high-end retail and hospitality.

These days compromise, even in difficult settings, is not necessary. Sub-standard images are no longer acceptable - to users, to regulatory authorities, or to the public.

There is increasing demand for higher definition cameras that can deliver both wide-area coverage and forensic level detail, even from significant distances. 4K cameras for public space surveillance are becoming more common, most ATMs now feature modular cameras with failover and high-performance WDR, while 12MP IR fisheye and panoramic cameras enable comprehensive surveillance of any given area with fewer cameras, to ensure no blind-spots and clear detail right to the periphery of a scene.

Yet today’s typical VSaaS can models cannot provide that level choice for diverse locations.  Most suppliers offer only a limited range of 2MP cameras that don’t give users the visual awareness and detail they need. 

And HD image quality is now also the essential foundation for today’s increasingly useful and practical video analytics, with AI-driven solutions now solving more of those real-world challenges: control room staff under time pressure to respond to incidents, teams lacking the resources to watch multiple camera feeds, time-consuming search and review making it hard to investigate incidents, and human error leading to incidents being missed. AI is helping to close down those potential loopholes and increase operational efficiency. 

As processing power has increased, both AI appliances and VMS that comes with deep learning analytics have become more affordable, even for small to mid-sized businesses. In more and more applications AI video is delivering actionable intelligence and reducing false-positive alarms, making detection, verification, and incident responses faster, efficient, and ensuring better outcomes. It’s also speeding up investigations with metadata searching by event, object type, and people. And all this functionality is more accurate and increases productivity when high-definition cameras capture rich metadata even in low and challenging light conditions. 

Today’s on-prem and affordable VMS is already very smart when it comes to adapting to bandwidth conditions, and coping with data peaks and bottlenecks, by automatically adjusting the resolution and frame rate of each device.

So, in an emergency for example, real-time viewing and control takes priority while video storage back to servers is temporarily buffered. By contrast, latency continues to be an issue for most VSaaS solutions, particularly on mobile devices, meaning critical incidents can be missed.

And while VSaaS vendors make claims about access to video anytime and anywhere, this is dependent on the internet connection and bandwidth available.  

The promise of ‘anytime, anywhere is more than matched by on-prem NVR- and server-based solutions that come with free mobile applications giving users 4K live view and playback from smartphones and tablets, as well as bandwidth control options to make sure users can view multiple split screens with next to no latency.

And let’s not forget, only a few years ago, customers tended to worry about increased storage burdens when they upgraded to Full-HD. But today H.265, together with specialist compression technologies such as IDIS Intelligent Codec, have eliminated those concerns. On average, users can expect 65-75% storage savings compared to older H.264 systems. 

One consequence – and major benefit – is that customers no longer hesitate when opting for 5MP as standard, or higher for wide area coverage. And users who need to store video for up to 90 days have increasingly taken advantage of improved compression as we are seeing in the cannabis sector.

Finally, anyone confused by the current VSaaS hype should be reassured by the track record of the established video sector. For years now, vendors have consistently focused technical advances on the needs of security, safety, and facilities management users, and based innovation on solving real-world challenges for those departments and users. That market understanding and knowledge, built up over decades, will continue to underpin exciting on-prem as well as hybrid developments going forward. 

Those continuous performance improvements are what the established video vendors are so good at – so far, it’s not clear how VSaaS vendors will catch up.

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