That&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve always wondered really, why are CCTV&#x27;s often so bad? The old systems (from what I&#x27;ve seen on TV anyway) seemed to put the image of four cameras onto one video tape, reducing quality even more.<p>Of course, a million cameras running 24&#x2F;7 produce an enormous amount of data, that just increases exponentially as quality improves. They can probably easily discard 90% of the footage with basic checks (is there anything besides the background visible), and use a smart compression algorithm, but still.