Market research firm, ABI Research estimates that the video surveillance market will grow to be about $46 billion by 2013 following a phase of explosive growth. Meanwhile, the homeland security industry in the US is likely to be spending about $170 billion annually by 2015, predicts Homeland Security Research.  Apparently, the homeland security department in the US has paid close to $130 billion to private contractors to boost domestic security systems.

Technology in the security and surveillance industry is developing exceptionally fast. One of the companies engaged in this industry, Video Stream offers products that unify video surveillance analog and internet protocol (IP) worlds. This enables higher resolutions, convergence onto existing IP cabling infrastructure, easier routing over long distances especially on multi-building sites, reduces space requirements, enables progressive scanning rendering clearer images, supports different streaming media and compression formats to relieve transmission bandwidth and data storage requirements (MJPEG, MPEG4, H.264) and provides a thin transport layer for remote storage.