Probably being paranoid, but it seems to me like one of the few untapped utilities of this much cheap storage is just increased surveillance. Hi resolution recording of everything, all the time.
Not really? Storage isn't really much of a limiter, tape drives are huge. High res is more about the camera AFAIK, high res but low refresh rate(frame rate?) probably doesn't have much of a transfer speed issue to necessitate SSD speeds.
If you want to search and index it, you don't want to do that on tapes. It's doable, but difficult. And what benefits tapes gain in reliability/long term storage, a RAID system would negate. Cheaper large SSDs make these kinds of systems more economical to the average person.
I dunno. It's all about lowering the barriers of accessibility. Tape drives are not widely adopted. Cloud camera monitoring is already common. Windows is pushing this recall feature, cameras are on everything, AI video analysis is taking off, and the populous is completely numb on privacy issues. My tech paranoia sense is usually right on track. We'll see
GP was wrong about tapes, but plenty of these systems use hard drives already. They can use specialized drives that are cheap and have slow write speeds, because streaming video is a constant rate per second. They also don't record unless there's movement. The network is also a limiting factor.