Research & Trends: Risk Mitigation Through Managed Video Services

By King Rogers, KRG Analytics, Inc.

How many of the 7.5 million cameras deployed in U.S. retail stores today are being used and to what extent? The most consistent answer to that question is less than 2% are actually capturing images, and about 2% of that is stored but then ignored, with the balance somehow simply disappearing. If this data is true, retailers really need to step up their efforts to add value to this capital investment. But, managing video capture, video utilization, and video storage is neither a primary function of retail loss prevention, nor is it very high on the list of priorities loss prevention departments contend with daily. This is too bad, because there is extreme risk mitigation value in effective use of video records.