There has been a lot of conjecture in the press as to why Avigilon has spent some $96 million on buying up patents in the Video Surveillance industry in the last 2 months.

Not only is this unpresidented in the industry but even for Avigilon it will significantly reduced its ability to invest in more conventional strategic growth prospects.

An ambitious fast growing company like Avigilon needs large sums of money to sustain growth, in addition to investing in R&D and business development. Its current move, betting on Video Analytics patents, could be a bridge too far. But is the motive about growth or protection; or as some cynics believe, the entry of new patent troll? This could cause great concern in the industry.

Avigilon have not provide much detail about their new strategy other than the $13.3m recent purchase of video analytics patents that extend into behavioural recognition, video segmentation and meta-data.

The patents come from four separate companies: Behavioural Recognition Systems (BRS Labs), Face Double, ITS7 and VideoMining. This deal comes one month after the video surveillance provider spent $80 million to acquire patents from their old adversary, ObjectVideo.

The strategy shows a clear focus on video analytics, wich has been touted as “the next big thing” for the last 5 years; but so far has not progressed commercially.

If sophisticated analytics can be done on the edge, then this would be a major break-though and bringing these patents together would put Avigilon in an extremely strong position.

Avigilon is a relatively new and fast growing Video Surveillance company, they have never been short on confidence so lets see if they can pull it off.