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Roundtable contributor Tom Galvin is principal of NetVideo Consulting, and former VP of engineering for GE Security and former VP of product development for Verint-Loronix.

Vlado Damjanovski is an Australian CCTV expert and lecturer, and author of the book "CCTV." He is involved in standards for surveillance in Australia and closely watching international standards activities.

Roundtable participant John Honovich is founder of IPvideomarket.info and an analyst on the network video industry. He formerly worked with 3VR and Sensormatic.

Galvin: Again, interoperability will allow end-users to select the best of breed products for the overall system. Corporate IT directors will appreciate that both the PSIA and ONVIF proposals are based on accepted IT and networking standards.

Do standards for network video devices help or hinder the manufacturers?

Galvin: It depends on how specific manufacturers respond. There is a lot of historical evidence to suggest that standards for interoperability are generally good for an industry as a whole. Think of consumer electronics (DVD, VHS) telecommunications (SIP protocol for enterprise IP phones) and IT (IEEE standards for Wifi, IETF standards for the Internet). If the video surveillance industry is successful in widely adopting a standard, it will force vendors to provide value in different ways. Camera integrations with a specific NVR or software package will no longer be a differentiating feature. More vendor resources will be spent on building end-user value from new features, productivity enhancements, analytics and new service models. The overall market will grow as end-users derive more value from network video.

Honovich: Standards help manufacturers with low market share including those looking to enter the industry. Standards can undermine the power of market leaders.

Damjanovski: Standards in general can never hinder a manufacturer. The fact that a device is compliant to a recognized standard makes it more attractive for the wider market. Certainly, different manufacturers may have their own way of doing things, which could be better than the others in some way, but a wisely written standard will not exclude innovation in technology, but only put a framework for common language between various products. The same is with the video compression standards. For example, MPEG2 does not define exactly how you do your compression, but defines how you put together the data so that a decoder can read it. There are variety of MPEG2 compression implementations that may have some difference in quality.

Do you think the manufacturing community would actually adopt standards on IP video devices, especially considering this industry's proprietary history?

Honovich: Yes, manufacturers will adopt standards. The industry has always used standards for camera interoperability. In analog, it was NTSC/PAL. The industry's proprietary history reflects a general poor business case for interoperability for other systems. Interoperability between cameras and video management systems has very high value and I expect vendors to be very motivated to adopt such standards.