This live presentation discussed our new research on the global market for video surveillance in 2025. What was once a market centered on cameras and on-premise recording equipment is evolving into a proactive intelligence infrastructure.
The global video surveillance market reached $33.8 billion in 2024 and is forecast to grow to nearly $48 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 6%.
Video Surveillance Software Shift
Video surveillance is shifting from a reactive post-incident review tool to a proactive intelligence infrastructure. Traditional hardware, including cameras, storage devices, and recorders, is experiencing growth, but software, analytics platforms, and cloud services are expanding at a much faster rate.
This shift to software is changing total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations, and this matters for anyone making procurement or investment decisions. Recurring software subscriptions and analytics licenses are increasingly important to TCO. Capital expenditure (CAPEX) on hardware represents a shrinking percentage of spending, but lifecycles have shortened to between five and seven years for enterprise installations, meaning hardware depreciates faster.
AI-enabled cameras with edge processing capabilities are steadily gaining market share, performing object detection, license plate recognition, behavior analysis, and privacy-preserving redaction in real time. While video analytics are not new, vendors have been supplying and, in some cases, overpromising capabilities for years, our research shows genuine progress over the past two years.
Geopolitics Reshaping the Market
The period between mid-2023 and mid-2025 has seen a transition from sweeping policy declarations to hardened enforcement with inevitable video surveillance market consequences.
The United States has tightened Federal Communications Commission (FCC) equipment authorization bans, making it nearly impossible for restricted vendors to re-enter through partnerships or rebranding. NDAA Section 5949, effective December 2027, prohibits US government procurement from certain Chinese semiconductor companies.
What distinguishes this period is the geographic spread. Canada has banned Hikvision operations entirely following a national security review. India now mandates that all manufacturers submit hardware, software, and source code for government security testing before sale. NATO and European Union members are adopting trusted supplier frameworks for critical infrastructure.
The result is a bifurcated global market where the same product is saleable in one region and prohibited in another. Hikvision reported just 3.5 percent revenue growth in 2024, a significant slowdown from earlier expansion rates. Meanwhile, NDAA-compliant vendors like Hanwha Vision are capturing market share in Western markets.
For vendors, this means compliance documentation, geographic market segmentation, and potentially significant supply chain restructuring. For buyers in critical infrastructure and government-adjacent sectors, procurement policies must now include end-to-end supply chain disclosure and country-of-origin verification for subcomponents, not just final assembly. This bifurcation is unlikely to reverse soon and will remain a defining feature of the global market for the next few years.
Drones as a New Growth Vector
One of the most intriguing findings from our research is the emergence of security drones. The market currently represents approximately $500 million, small within the broader video surveillance industry but growing rapidly, driven by high-value deployments where drones solve problems fixed cameras cannot address economically.
The innovation isn’t better cameras or longer flight times; it’s autonomy. Drone-in-a-box systems combine ruggedized aircraft, weatherproof docking stations, and onboard analytics into solutions that can operate around the clock with minimal human intervention. When integrated with alarm systems, these drones launch automatically, navigate adaptive flight paths, and stream live video directly into existing video management systems.
The value proposition is becoming compelling. One US security firm reported a 60 percent reduction in guarding costs after deploying autonomous patrol drones. For properties with expansive footprints, like solar farms, logistics centers, corporate campuses, and universities, drones provide video surveillance coverage that would require dozens of fixed cameras or continuous human patrols. Video management system providers like Genetec and Milestone now support drone control and mission dispatch directly from security interfaces, normalizing drones within mainstream security workflows.
The video surveillance market is no longer just about cameras recording footage. It’s about software-defined intelligence and dynamic sensor architectures that include aerial platforms. Organizations making procurement decisions today need to think beyond traditional hardware refresh cycles and consider the architectural implications of this rapidly evolving landscape.
