Steve Gorski has experienced some déjà vu at recent trade shows. As GM Americas for Mobotix, a network camera company that takes a decentralized approach to storage, Gorski has been evangelizing the benefits of storage onboard the camera for a while.

Now, he finds that he’s not alone in talking about the benefits of storage on the edge. While each manufacturer’s approach is different, in the past couple of years several video companies have come out with camera offerings that include edge video storage.

“Storage on the edge makes a lot of sense,” Gorski said. “It’s been interesting to watch more and more manufacturers decide to do this. … Off the top of my head I can think of three or four.”

All Mobotix cameras come with megapixel storage onboard, which isn’t the case with other manufacturers. And the actual onboard storage is only part of Mobotix’s decentralized approach. “If you need more, we have NAS [network attached storage] options,” he said.

One of the reasons other manufacturers have started to offer storage on the edge is because of rapidly increasing capacity.

Today, you can store “five days of full frame rate recording of high definition video on a … $40 64-gig SD card,” said Fredrik Nilsson, GM Americas for network video manufacturer Axis Communications.

Looking ahead, Nilsson surmised that in 2015, that same $40 SD card will be able to hold 30 days of video, in 2018 it will store three months and ten years from now a $40 SD card could hold one year’s worth of video.

Increased capacity makes edge storage viable where it wasn’t ten years ago, Nilsson argues. He said that Axis came out with a camera about ten years ago that could store two minutes worth of video on the camera. “We thought it would be revolutionizing,” he explained. It wasn’t. “It didn’t change a thing,” he said. […]