jeanbureau

Hello Our company will soon offer Video Surveillance Installation as one of its services, and I am supposed to figure out how to do it. I have never done this before. Basically, we plan on installing over 20 to 30 convenience stores, between 4 to 8 IP cameras (indoor) per store. The idea is that our company will be the only one who has access to the recordings (on our server), whereas the store manager will only have access to the real time video stream. We won't be monitoring their cameras, we will just be storing the videos (one month) in case they ask us some recent footage of robberies etc. ------- My questions are: 1) What equipment is needed in each store ? ---> cameras + NVR + PoE switch + PC / TV Monitor ? 2) Do each store need an NVR ? Estimation of the costs range of the equipment per store ? 3) Which range of server is able to store such amount of video footage coming from 30 stores ? (Let's assume we go for a 20 fps + H.264 format + 720 resolution per camera) 4) Does this sound like an overall bad idea to you ? Would it be more simple / profitable to simply install a CCTV system in each store, and let them deal with their NVR to access recordings (local storage), instead of hosting it ourselves on a dedicated server ? Thank you for your replies in advance.

Awesome. Thanks a lot for that rather comprehensive answer Zr1.

To be honest I wasn't convinced it was a good idea, but since I don't know much about CCTV, I had to ask to be sure. So basically we're better off just charging these stores to install their cameras and that's it ? The rest would be up to them.