Think fast: Your customer’s DVR has crashed. It’s beyond resuscitation. What do you do? If you haven’t faced this dilemma already, you are bound to sooner or later, because the average life expectancy of a DVR is about half that of an analog camera. Welcome to the midlife crisis of an analog system. The stakes keeps mounting. Perhaps the DVR is out of warranty. Maybe the DVR manufacturer is not even in business anymore. What do you do? Before your client rushes to purchase another DVR, consider this: over the course of an analog CCTV system’s life, they will have to replace every single DVR at least once, if not more. It is an expensive proposition without even taking into consideration how much video coverage is lost every time you have to make a swap.

So what’s the alternative? If their analog cameras are still meeting operational requirements — detection, recognition and/or identification then let them keep running, and just replace the DVR with a more future-proof IP-based video encoder.

It extends the life of your customer’s existing investment and serves as the first step in a clear migration path to a full IP-based solution and all its associated benefits.

As your customer’s analog cameras begin to fail, you can replace them with network cameras which operate seamlessly with their encoder counterparts. It is a great strategy for upgrading in affordable increments.