Reply #14: Costs are going down

[DissedByBush]

But replacement will be slow.

Modern surveillance systems excel at conserving space since they can easily be motion activated.

Even if they record 24/7 modern codecs use little storage for the hours of non-movement you'd normally find in such a tape. A guy walking through a store takes very little data since it records only the changes caused by his path, not constant recording of the entire frame, every frame.

Modern codecs compress far more than old ones while retaining superior quality, but they require computing power not available back then. These days you need no more computing power than is found in a smart phone to record and compress one high-definition video stream.

That plus storage is cheap these days. A one terabyte drive costs much less than the 540 megabyte drive I bought 15 years ago.