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Police Body Camera Business All About the Video Evidence Storage
Lucas123 writes: Body cameras are the fastest growing segment of the police video camera business. The two largest police body camera manufacturers today — Taser and VieVu — say they've shipped devices to 41% of the nation's 18,000 police departments. But, the hardware is only the basis for the real business: video evidence storage. Last year, Taser's gross profit margins on hardware were 15.6%; the gross margins for video storage were 51%, according to Glenn Mattson, who follows Taser as an equity analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann. "There's no contest. They don't care about making money on the cameras," Mattson said. As of the first quarter of this year, more than a petabyte of police video has been uploaded to Taser's Evidence.com service. Just one of VieVu's clients, the Oakland PD, has uploaded more than a million police videos. The cost of storage, however, is so high that police departments have been forced to determine strict retention policies, that in some cases may effect the long-term handling of evidence. In Birmingham, Ala., for example, where they've deployed 300 cameras and hope to double that this year, the the video cameras themselves cost about $180,000, but the department's total outlay for a five-year contract including cloud storage with Taser will be $889,000.
It is a market ripe for some competition.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That may be a part of the advantage of going with one of these vendors. We sometimes hear about malfunctioning cameras when police are accused of abuse. Sometimes multiple cameras malfunction at the same time.
A properly designed system would make deleting evidence difficult, and even if the evidence were to be deleted, it would likely leave an audit trail showing that the video did indeed exist at one point and reveal when and how it was deleted.
Before anyone gets too worked up, a 50% GROSS profit margin is nothing too exciting for something that is basically a software business. If it were a 50% NET profit margin then that would be different and the net profit margin is the one that really matters - it's the so-called bottom line. Gross profit margins are just the revenue minus the direct cost involved in the service (direct labor and materials mostly). It does not include cost of sales, marketing, overhead, administration, indirect labor, utilities, etc)
For comparison software companies typically have gross margins considerably higher than 50%. For example Microsoft had a 66% gross profit margin last quarter. A manufacturing company typically has gross profit margins between 10-30%. GM and Lockheed Martin have gross profits of around 11% for example. Toyota has gross profits around 20%.
Amazon and Google could go to each state and offer a state-wide contract that puts all of the data in their clouds for peanuts compared to what these providers charge.
I work as a storage tech for a police video footage storage company. we guarantee indefinite archives, with five 9's of uptime in a secure location. At first people were skeptical of the prices, but using the latest high speed storage devices on a linux platform, theres simply no beating our performance. /dev/null (our in-house application) is automatic, and a monthly bill is generated once the null fills up which includes maintenance fees like replacing the old null with a fresh, empty null for storage. This fee, also referred to as an "invoice for the purchase of a Rolls Royce" is our only frustration as our billing system is confusing for customers. Things like "Vacation package, Spain" are actually the normal cost of sourcing fresh nulls and installing them. invoices for services such as "yacht" and "truffle pheasant" refer to our restore service which uses "/dev/urandom" technology to provide nearly infinite high quality video.
Storage to
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