Driving home this last Friday in Austin I heard an announcement on the local station stating that Austin’s Police Department had committed to buying 500 body cams for police officers at a price of either 2 or 3 million(I don’t know what all this includes). And I do not know if AMBA chips are in these cameras.
This type of purchase should help AMBA in general regardless. Austin, while unfortunately being stuck in Texas, is generally considered to be progressive. I am guessing that this perceived status of Austin’s will help the transition nationwide to more police body cams if other departments look at this as a positive example to follow or perhaps an inevitable trend.
I have no experience with this stuff, just thinking out loud…
It isn’t just putting cameras on each officer. The data collection, storage and management challenge looks pretty significant to me. Servers with lots of disks to store the data, at least one software package to manage it, and a whole heap of memory cards to rotate through the cameras. And backing it all up, of course. If the rules of chain-of-evidence requires the original flash cards, not just a copy of the data, that provides another whole pile of storage and management.
You never know. The place doesn’t look the same as it used to you. Lots of folks bringing the bling!
Seriously, I thought the same thing that you thought…but it was either 2 or 3 million that was announced. I am wondering if they are perhaps needing to buy lots of support equipment? If so, perhaps they lumped this in together.
If I had to take a guess on which camera vendor / software / storage company they would be choosing, I would put my money on Taser(TASR).
There’s no announcement from TASR on Austin but Austin only stated that they will purchase, not that they have.
The TASR body cam is standard in the marketplace. What is getting them a lot of attention is their Evidence.com software where it has all the video, stores it in their cloud and is a subscription service.
I don’t think, and maybe somebody can confirm, that TASR uses AMBA chips today.
Here is just one article that sums up TASR in 30 seconds.
Sox Nation
Long Time Holder of TASR and have seen it go way up, way down, way up and most recently down from last quarters earnings (which were good but guidance was soft)
Importantly, all of the police departments named elected to purchase subscriptions to Evidence.com to go with their new on-body cameras. Evidence.com is TASER’s data storage service, whereby video recorded by the cameras can be uploaded and stored on TASER servers for easier review and retrieval.
According to TASER’s website, Axon Body cameras retail for $399 apiece, and Flexes cost $599. As such, the sum total upfront earnings for all these sales for TASER is only about $423,000
Much more important to TASER’s financial well-being is that 810 new Axon cameras, charging a minimum of $25 a month for EVIDENCE.com storage, will generate $20,250 in high-margin recurring revenue for TASER every month, yield $243,000 in storage revenues every year and eclipse the revenues from the sale of the actual cameras, per se, in less than 21 months.