SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - San Jose police are testing head-mounted cameras to record interactions with the public. ... Officers are to turn on the cameras every time they talk with anyone. They download the recordings after every shift. ...Taser International ... is paying for the experiment, but the price could be [EXTREMELY] high if San Jose equips all 1,400 officers. [LINK]
"Evidence.com will charge $5,700 per officer over a three year period to use the videocam system." [Information Week, Dec. 19, 2009]
Hmmm...
1400 times 5700 equals about EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS. For fricken cameras. Don't worry. The $5700 is probably a high-ball number to make the real price look low. I smell unwashed salesmen at work.
The business plan for this critically depends on forcing the clients to upload their video to an off-site storage system IN ORDER TO MAKE IT INTO A "SERVICE", instead of a simple hardware purchase.
What about the bandwidth?
Clients will have to pay for Internet bandwidth too to help the OEM with THEIR business plan!
"...2 to 2.8 GB per day per officer..." Call it 2.5 GB. About 200 days per year on the street. 2.5 GB * 200 * 1400 = 700 TB upload per year. YMMV. Call it 'hundreds and hundreds' of TB. Upload.
Ouch. That's not likely to be free.
Stand-by for an alternate system that allows local storage of only the necessary video clips beyond a scheduled deletion scheme. It's not that complicated to imagine that a better, locally controlled, system could also be significantly less expensive. I've seen DVD-R disks for $0.14. RAID arrays aren't that expensive. One could hire a lot of staff for millions of dollars per year.
The basic issue is that uploading the video and being forced to download it later is awkward and, frankly, stupid.