SD Card's Future for Video Surveillance Storage

SD cards are gaining attention as their use in the consumer world for digital cameras, smartphones and laptops increases significantly. In the video surveillance market, it is becoming increasingly common for IP cameras to support SD cards and, with that, interest in storing video inside the camera itself.

Are we quickly moving to a world where centralized storage dies and storage moves to the camera?

In this report, we examine what the video surveillance market will look like in 2014 - 5 years from now - analyzing the barriers that need to be resolved, projecting advances in features and pricing and analyzing the competitive position of SD cards versus other forms of video surveillance storage.

Today, SD cards storage for IP cameras almost certainly represents less than 1/10 of 1% (.1%) of new deployments. By 2014, we project that SD cards in IP cameras will replace traditional centralized storage only in a few niches, remaining a distinct minority (in stark contrast to the consumer PC market). However, by that time, SSDs will start to be seriously considered as a replacement for hard drives in video surveillance.