I’ve seen several claims about video management systems that scale to support thousands of cameras at remote locations over the Internet. Some of these claims state you don’t need a storage device (such as an NVR or DVR) at your remote sites. But that “no local storage” claim doesn’t hold true for broadband Internet connections.

Remotely viewing video is great!  But if you’re working with broadband, you’re stuck dealing with a limited amount of upload speed at your remote site. While one might have multiple megabits of download bandwidth, the upstream of all broadband connections is commonly limited to between 256Kbps and 768Kbps (or about 0.3 to 0.8 megabits).

In North America, the only option available to get more upload bandwidth for most is to buy a T1 at 5 to 10 times the cost of a typical DSL or Cable modem line. This will get you 1.5Mbps of upload capacity.

Now let’s look at a typical camera streaming at just 5 frames per second at a tiny 320×240 video resolution can use around 100-250Kbps. That’s good enough quality for a very basic video viewing experience. Up the resolution to 640×480 and 15 frames per second to get near (but not quite) “TV-like” quality and you’re looking at 400Kbps – 1.5Mbps. So if you only have a regular broadband connection and more than one camera and you want to record all the video, you’re going to have to store video locally.