Hangzhou, China – September 21, 2026 -- A joint survey by asmag.com and Hikvision found that 38.2% of video security professionals call storage cost or capacity a "major challenge," while another 43.2% rate it "moderate," together accounting for 81.4% of respondents.
Storage costs have climbed over the past 12 months for most operators
Asked how the storage challenge has changed compared with a year earlier, 43.2% of respondents said pressure has "increased moderately," pointing to persistent upward cost trends across video security deployments rather than a one-time spike.
Hikvision's Guanlan Encoding targets the bottleneck with AI-driven compression
Built on the H.265 standard, Guanlan Encoding embeds Hikvision's Guanlan Large-Scale AI Model into continuous encoding workflows. Instead of compressing an entire frame uniformly, the technology identifies high-value content—people, vehicles, moving objects—and allocates more encoding detail to those areas, while compressing static or low-motion backgrounds far more aggressively. Hikvision states the approach cuts storage needs by 30% to 50% on average without degrading detail relevant to investigations and monitoring.
Market awareness of the new codec is already outpacing typical adoption curves
Despite its recent introduction, 43.3% of survey respondents said they are already familiar with Guanlan Encoding though without hands-on use, and 8.3% reported they are actively using it—putting combined awareness and adoption above 50% shortly after launch.
The survey, titled "AI encoding technology for video security," was conducted among asmag.com readers to gauge interest in AI-based video compression amid rising storage-cost pressure across security and surveillance projects.