Most businesses today rely on a CCTV installation in order to keep themselves or their property safe, and have become so ubiquitous that any security system with installed cameras is described as “CCTV”.
However, to ensure that you have the right system for your facility’s needs, it is important to know what a CCTV system actually includes, what it is used for outside of security and whether every security system on the market today actually strictly is CCTV.
What Is CCTV?
CCTV is short for Closed-Circuit Television, a video technology system where video cameras broadcast a signal to a specific set of monitors, as opposed to broadcasting to any compatible receiver.
This technology has seen a remarkably broad set of uses. Teleconferencing and peer-to-peer video calls more broadly could technically be considered a form of CCTV, whilst CCTV was also used to broadcast pay-per-view events to a limited set of venues such as cinemas.
Its most common use, however, is for security purposes, where sets of cameras are transmitted to a monitoring room and recording suite, where footage is monitored and recorded for security and crime prevention purposes.
Why Do Security Camera Systems Use CCTV?
Part of the reason why CCTV technology is used is for security reasons; broadcasting a security feed on a broadcast feed is logistically complex, expensive and legally complex. Many countries have licensing laws concerning the broadcasting of television signals.
Having CCTV cameras connected to each other, either directly through point-to-point or point-to-multipoint cables or through some kind of wireless technology, gets around this issue.
The first commercially available CCTV system, Remington Rand’s Vericon, claimed that because it used a completely wired broadcast system without requiring traditional radio waves, it could be operated without permits or licences.
As well as this, it is the easiest way to ensure that security footage stays private and confidential; only certain monitors and thus certain people with access to the monitors can view the footage.
Whilst there were theoretical benefits to a broadcast-based security system, as long as it used some kind of feed scrambling system to avoid broadcasting to the general public, the issues far outweighed the benefits.
Do All Security Systems Use CCTV Technology?
Whilst far fewer CCTV systems rely on wires, with many using wireless connection systems such as the Internet of Things, as well as digital video recording software and the ability to access security feeds remotely, they are typically still considered CCTV systems.
The key to it is the “closed-circuit” part of the security technology. As long as the data is restricted, typically through a range of physical and digital forms of access control, it is not a widely accessible data feed and thus, by extension, is still CCTV.
There are some exceptions to this, where security cameras are broadcast on public networks, but these tend to be rare and not commonly used for security purposes.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, an early public livestream, was initially a closed-circuit device until it was connected to the internet, where it stopped being strictly “closed”.
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