We're recording everything. And learning nothing.
Right now, at this exact moment, millions of cameras are capturing the world. Security systems in shopping malls. Drones scanning construction sites. Traffic cameras at every intersection. Retail stores monitoring aisles. Hospitals tracking corridors.
By 2025, global video surveillance data is projected to reach 2.5 exabytes per day. That's 2.5 billion gigabytes. Every single day.
Here's the problem: almost none of it will ever be seen by human eyes.
The footage piles up in servers, accumulates in cloud storage, and becomes digital noise. We've built an incredible infrastructure to capture reality in perfect detail. But we've created a new problem in the process—one so massive that entire industries are bleeding money because of it.
Video has become our biggest blind spot.
98% of Your Security Investment Is Gathering Digital Dust
Let's talk numbers that should keep business owners awake at night.
The global video surveillance market is worth $62.6 billion and growing at 10.4% annually. Companies spend millions installing cameras, upgrading systems, expanding coverage. They believe more cameras equal more security.
They're wrong.
Research shows that security personnel can effectively monitor footage for only 20 minutes before attention drops by 95%. Even the most dedicated security professional can only watch 2-4 camera feeds simultaneously with any effectiveness.
Meanwhile, a typical mid-sized retail chain generates 30,000 hours of footage per month. That's 1,250 continuous days of video. To watch it all in real-time, you'd need 42 people staring at screens 24/7, never blinking, never looking away.
The math doesn't work.
Here's what actually happens: something goes wrong. A theft. An accident. A safety incident. Someone calls security and says, "Check the cameras from Tuesday between 2 PM and 5 PM near the east entrance."
Then begins the hunt. An operator sits down and starts scrubbing through footage. Fast-forwarding. Rewinding. Pausing on blurry frames. Trying to spot something—anything—relevant in hours of mundane footage.
Finding 30 seconds of critical footage takes an average of 6-8 hours of manual review.
By the time they find it, the incident report is already late. The insurance claim is delayed. The suspect is long gone. The pattern that could have prevented the next incident remains invisible.
This isn't a security problem. It's a data problem disguised as a security problem.
Banks are sitting on footage of fraud patterns they'll never detect. Logistics companies have drone data showing efficiency bottlenecks they'll never analyze. Hospitals have recordings that could prove liability cases—if anyone could find the relevant 90 seconds in 400 hours of hallway footage.
The global cost of this inefficiency? Conservative estimates put it north of $847 billion annually in lost productivity, missed insights, undetected incidents, and reactive rather than preventive operations.
We're paying billions to record. And getting almost nothing in return.
The Data Exists. The Intelligence Doesn't.
Here's the cruel irony: we've never had more visual data, and we've never been more blind.
Consider traffic management. Cities worldwide have invested heavily in smart city infrastructure. Traffic cameras at every major intersection. License plate readers on highways. Sensors monitoring flow patterns.
Jakarta has over 6,000 CCTV cameras monitoring traffic. Dhaka is rapidly expanding its network. Mumbai, Bangkok, Manila—every major Asian city is building comprehensive surveillance infrastructure.
They're generating petabytes of data. But when authorities need to track a specific vehicle involved in a hit-and-run, they're back to the same manual process humans have used for decades: someone sitting in a control room, scrubbing through footage, hoping to spot the right car at the right moment.
A vehicle can cross a city in 40 minutes. Finding it across that journey can take days.
The same pattern repeats across industries:
Agriculture: Drones capture stunning 4K footage of crop fields. Farmers can see every inch of their land from above. But spotting early-stage disease? Identifying pest infestation before it spreads? That requires someone to actually review the footage with trained eyes. Most drone data is captured, stored, and forgotten. By the time disease is visible to the naked eye, it's already cost thousands in yield loss.
Construction: Sites deploy drones for progress monitoring and safety compliance. They generate massive datasets showing every phase of development. But identifying safety violations, tracking material movement, verifying work completion—these all require manual review. A 20-story building project might generate 500 hours of drone footage. Site managers watch perhaps 10 hours. The other 490? Digital filing cabinets.
Retail: Stores install cameras to prevent theft and understand customer behavior. They capture every shopper's journey through the store. But converting that into actionable insight—understanding traffic patterns, identifying bottlenecks, spotting organized retail crime patterns—requires analytics tools that most retailers either don't have or don't use effectively.
Manufacturing: Quality control cameras photograph every product coming off assembly lines. Thousands of images per hour. Human inspectors spot-check a fraction. Defect patterns that could indicate equipment failure go unnoticed until the failure actually happens.
The footage exists. The insights exist within that footage. But they're locked away, inaccessible, useless.
We've solved the capture problem. We haven't solved the comprehension problem.
Video recording technology has advanced exponentially. We can capture in 8K. We can store practically unlimited footage in the cloud. We can live-stream from anywhere on Earth.
But our ability to extract meaning from that footage? That's remained stubbornly stuck in the analog era. Human eyes. Human attention spans. Human limitations.
The bottleneck isn't the cameras. It's what happens after the recording stops.
What if video worked more like Google? What if instead of watching, you could search? What if the invisible became instantly visible?
At Kaz Software, we're building Omnivisia—the solution to this $847 billion problem. Stay tuned.
