25TH ANNIVERSARY
Carl-Axel Alm, Senior Expert Enginer and Martin Gren, Co-founder of Axis
Changing the face of surveillance: The brains behind the first network camera 25 years ago, at a trade show in the US called the Networld+Interop show, the small print server company Axis Communications launched AXIS Neteye 200, the world's first network camera. This is the story behind this invention. There’s no proven formula to success. But on a closer look, great inventions and innovation have a few things in common: Enthusiastic and engaged people with an idea, an incentive and good timing. These factors were also the base for the invention of the first Axis network camera. And it all started with a journey to Japan… Time travel to the beginning of a revolutionary idea Let’s jump back to a day in the early ‘90s when the seed to a great idea was planted: Martin Gren, the co-founder of Axis, was on a business trip in Tokyo to meet potential customers. One of them turned out to have an inventory of analog cameras that were rather difficult, if not impossible to sell. Knowing that Axis had experimented with technology that made networks smarter, he asked Martin if it was possible to attach them to a network.
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Martin Gren saw the potential and the idea started to sprout. What he didn’t know then was that an Axis engineer named Carl-Axel Alm, was in the process of developing a prototype of a network video conference system. When Martin came back from Japan with his new idea and saw what his colleague was working on, he realized that they weren’t far away from turning this from an idea into reality. But instead of using the technology for a video conference system, a sector where he didn’t see Axis doing business in the future, Martin suggested using the new hardware to create a network camera. When talking about the realization of a network video camera that receives control data and submits the recorded images via the internet, it is important to remember that this whole development process happened before the world wide web was commonly known.
It was mainly used by network engineers and specialists. The team, therefore, had to build the product in line with the technology that was available at the time. Looking back at the situation at the time, Carl-Axel explains: “If you had a really nice boss, maybe you had a modem and a 200 MHz computer." "The performance was slow, only one frame every 17 seconds (or 3 frames per minute). So the products we did were in line with the available technology at the time,” explains Carl-Axel, and Martin adds: “We built the product only because we could, not because we saw a market for it.” Finally, on September 17, 1996, in Atlanta, just after the Olympic games, the hard work came to fruition in the form of the first-ever launch of a network camera: “NetEye”, AXIS 200 Network Camera.
