The shocking news that Norbain have found themselves in such a difficult situation over the last few days is lesson to all in the industry. The reasons given for the the demise of old Norbain were clear and unequivocal. Quite simply the industry has taken a downturn. New projects are on hold and new sales are just not materializing from any other source.
Some time ago now Norbain chose to take the route away from analogue products and “focus” on IP security equipment. This was based on industry predictions that all CCTV and security would be IP based in the very near future , tipping point has been predicted by Norbain as 2013. This has simply not happened and the evidence is clear that for the CCTV industry to cope with both a downturn in demand and new competition from IT integrators it has to learn lessons and change very very quickly.
Products need to be cutting edge, sales techniques changed with more online sales and support being a move forward but one that must be mixed with a good old fashioned voice on the end of a phone when its needed. More than this though the public have been let down too many times by poor results when video evidence is required. The frustration felt by small business as well as the public in high profile cases is immense when they are seeing poor images with the chance of any type of identification laughable. That’s the weakness of course of analogue and why Norbain were keen to move to IP and with IP comes HD video.
This is the way forward, HD CCTV solutions must be sold in future if the industry is regain the faith of the UK public. Cheap analogue solutions are killing the industry. IP and HD was Norbain’s vision and with true integration achievable between all IP security products such as CCTV, access control and intruder alarms the idea was definitely a good plan. The problem is the adoption of IP by the CCTV industry itself has been slow to non-existent.
We advocate that HD is the way forward to. HD however over coax is a simpler and cheaper solution in many cases than IP. Using existing coax and still achieving HD images is highly beneficial to the end user where a new IP infrastructure is not practical.
So the lesson that needs to be learnt is to give the end users crisp clear images, give them evidence they can use. Make CCTV a desirable purchase once more, after all everyone agrees the concept is a good one. This goal can be achieved but it can only be achieved with the deployment of HD in as many applications as possible.