> A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
The contract awards are public no? Axon et al probably make the majority of their money on service charges for storing, accessing the data rather than on the cameras themselves.
I would guess so, though that doesn't exactly get rid of the costs of the hardware.
I'd be interested to see what the op ex is for a company running this sort of business. You're storing lots of video, which isn't exactly cheap, and need to do so in a way that allows for cataloging, backup, and durable references to the data. On top of that, these cameras are transmitting data in a way that doesn't have a huge antenna sticking off of them, so there's almost certainly some sort of data plan to work with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile in play, transmitting some sort of video data over the network, either as a file transfer or streaming depending on the use case. That's another expense.
For every big city that's signing one of these contracts, there are probably a dozen small towns or villages also signing one with significantly more pressure on the government to keep budgets small. I suppose the big cities could be subsidizing the small towns.
You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
To answer the unasked question here, their business model is indeed making money off of collecting and storing the data, then granting law enforcement access to it. The gross P&L from the cameras themselves is an afterthought.
> You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
Anyone can put up anything on YouTube. Have a good example?