SJA speaks exclusively to DMP’s Rick and Jeff Britton, along with Brad Tucker and Ken Francis, Executive Vice President of Video Solutions, to discuss the company’s long-awaited entrance into the video market.
For more than 50 years, Digital Monitoring Products (DMP) has been one of the most closely followed names in the alarm dealer channel. So, when DMP confirmed it was entering the video monitoring market, Security Journal Americas Senior Editor Alistair Hookway sat down with the company’s leadership to find out why now and where the company sees the industry heading.
The short answer is that the technology has finally caught up with the company’s vision of a deliverable service. Earlier generations of video were held back by unreliable storage, weak analytics, high false-alarm rates and processing power that wasn’t cost-effective for professional monitoring. Those constraints made it hard to deliver a product that dealers and monitoring centers could depend on – so we made a conscious decision not to rush in.
That has changed markedly over the last decade. Analytics have become more accurate, processors more affordable and video architectures now support stronger detection and far fewer false positives. After 50 years as an industry leader, “too early” was never an acceptable answer. Once the pieces were in place, we believed the market had reached an inflection point. The technology was finally mature enough to support professional monitoring at scale, and so DMP began investing aggressively in video solutions designed specifically for the professional security channel.
Deliberately patient. DMP has always believed the right moment to enter a market is when the technology, economics and service model can genuinely support professional dealers and monitoring centers – not simply when a trend is gathering pace.
Plenty of companies rushed into video to grab an early foothold, but DMP built slowly and methodically instead, to the point where the dealer channel has come to trust the company’s judgment implicitly. That differentiation, we believe, is reinforced by direct relationships with end users – three decades of serving major banks and retailers gives us a feedback loop most competitors lack. New product development is as much customer driven as internally planned.
Video is not a side project – it’s the next major piece of a long-running unified platform strategy spanning intrusion, fire and access control. Virtual Keypad, Security Command and Entre already provide dealers and end users with a single security experience across commercial, retail, financial and government accounts.
Video strengthens that platform by improving alarm verification and video generated alarms; giving dealers a more complete offering to sell. The stated goal isn’t simply to sell cameras – it’s to give dealers and monitoring centers one unified platform with the appropriate APIs, integrations and analytics, rather than a patchwork of disconnected systems.
This has been a multi-year effort, not a sudden pivot. Rick and Jeff Britton have driven a quality focused culture within the DMP Executive Management Team for decades and DMP’s product team, led by Brad Tucker, has spent years preparing for a point where video could be introduced without compromising the company’s standards for reliability and dealer support.
Since early 2026, this has meant assembling the right sales team. Ken Francis was the first to join “full time” in February to lead the new effort. Since, Rick and Jeff have assembled a sales leadership team of experienced industry professionals who know video and, more importantly, the value of a unified platform offering to customers seeking a single user experience which provides value to on-site security teams whether they’re self-monitoring their systems or engaging with professional monitoring companies. Most recently, Nicola Oakie was hired to lead our monitoring and video programs and Mike Taylor, Executive Vice President, Sales to join Mark NeSmith, VP International Sales. We are incredibly excited to field a sales leadership team with their successful track record to lead DMP’s video launch and focus on unified video, access control, fire and intrusion solutions.
I have worked with DMP’s leadership for a quarter-century, during which time I was unaware of their interests or concerns with video monitoring technology. The shift began in January 2025, when a conversation with Jeff and Rick Britton convinced me that DMP was genuinely ready to go all-in on video monitoring. What I discovered after joining was a company further along than outsiders realized: engineering work on an expanded AlarmVision platform had been underway since early 2025, culminating in a reveal at ISC West only weeks after I started. My focus since has been building a hybrid solution combining on-premise intelligence, cloud analytics and monitoring-center workflows into something practical for dealers to install and support.
Several technologies have matured at once and that convergence is the real story. Camera resolution has climbed from a handful of megapixels two decades ago to sensors offering dozens of megapixels across multi-lens arrays, with low-light performance that now renders near-total darkness in usable detail. Streaming video over RTSP has largely displaced older thumbnail-and-email workflows, giving AI analytics a continuous feed rather than static snapshots.
The result is analytics accurate enough to be trusted by monitoring centers, rather than generating the flood of false alarms that plagued earlier video monitoring attempts as recently as five years ago. The demand for flexible, hybrid architecture – analytics running onsite and in the cloud alike – are also central to what dealers now expect from a video monitoring partner.
Since 2023, we have been expanding Virtual Keypad’s video capabilities while building a broader hardware and software portfolio. Our patented AlarmVision, introduced around that time, turns cameras into zoned sensors within the existing alarm experience dealers already know. In 2026, that expanded further into a professional commercial video line – doorbells, panoramic cameras and high-resolution IP cameras – alongside continued investment in integrations with established monitoring software providers. On the personnel side, we have added ten more video-focused engineering roles reporting to Pete Jankowski, Vice President, Video Engineering. By year-end, our video line will be optimized to support cloud-managed surveillance, onsite management, self-monitoring and full professional remote video monitoring alike.
We expect the fastest adoption to be in multi-site commercial environments, retail, education and outdoor applications – anywhere verified response, operational efficiency and clear incident documentation carry real weight. Beyond vertical markets, channel segments like retail, wholesale and guarding monitoring operations each use video differently. Guarding companies increasingly use it to offset expensive manpower, while wholesale monitoring operations build dealer networks to resell monitoring services – and many of those dealers are already DMP customers for intrusion and access, making a well-integrated video line a natural extension rather than a hard sell.
Over the next five years, we believe video monitoring will become a core part of professional security services rather than a separate category – driven by custom analytics that increasingly start on-site and migrate to hybrid with the cloud over time, further reducing false alarms. Customers increasingly want systems that deliver actionable intelligence. At the same time, dealers and monitoring centers need solutions that are affordable, efficient and scalable while being cost effective to deploy and manage.
Growth is our primary metric, alongside dealer uptake, monitoring center efficiency and integration performance. There is one striking data point that shows just how young the industry still is. Of roughly 2,500 burglar and fire alarm monitoring centers in the US, only around 200 currently monitor video – fewer than one in ten. We’re still very early in this transformation. We’re rounding first base, heading to second, as an industry.
The future belongs to unified platforms that combine intrusion, access control, video and intelligent analytics into a unified experience. DMP intends to help lead that future. For more than 50 years, our mission has been to support professional security companies with technology they can trust. As video monitoring enters its next phase of growth, that commitment remains unchanged.
This article was originally published in the October edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.