Live-Streaming AOV: What It Actually Is, and How to Spec It When Importing Solar 4G Cameras

What AOV means on a live-streaming camera

AOV (Always-On Video) is the architecture in which a camera records continuously, 24 hours a day, while holding standby draw low — an AI scene-analysis layer decides what gets kept at full quality, what gets kept at reduced quality, and what gets discarded. On a live stream the difference against a PIR camera is immediate and easy to verify: open the app and you get a picture straight away plus a continuous timeline running backwards, instead of a list of loose clips fired by an infrared motion sensor. It is worth saying plainly up front, because it causes real confusion in tenders: AOV is a generic industry term, not a brand and not any manufacturer's proprietary technology. It describes how the camera is built, not an exclusive feature.

For a wholesale buyer the practical consequence is that "live streaming" and "AOV" are not the same thing. Almost any solar 4G camera can open a stream when you ask it to. What sets an AOV model apart is that the camera was already watching before you opened the app — and that it can sustain that continuous watch without running flat before sunrise. That difference is settled in the electrical design of the unit, not in firmware and not in the sales pitch.

Why AOV displaced PIR in serious deployments

A PIR detector measures thermal contrast changes inside a detection cone. It is cheap, it is efficient, and it works perfectly well on a residential gate. On a farm, a construction site, a yard or a warehouse it starts to fail in ways the end client tends to discover late — usually on the day they need the footage:

• Slow or head-on movement. Someone moving low and slow, or a vehicle approaching straight towards the lens, produces very little lateral thermal change and may never trip the sensor.
• High ambient heat. When surrounding temperatures approach body temperature — tropical midday, hot sheet metal, exposed concrete — contrast collapses and sensitivity degrades in exactly the busiest hours.
• Out-of-zone events. The PIR cone is narrower than the lens field of view. Anything that happens inside the picture but outside the cone simply never gets recorded.
• Wake-up latency. The clip starts when the sensor trips, not before. The first few seconds — almost always the useful ones — are gone.
• False positives. Branches, rain, animals and hot air currents generate clips that burn battery and data for nothing.

On a B2B project those gaps are not an annoyance, they are lost evidence in an insurance claim, a shrinkage report or a livestock theft case. That is the sales argument for AOV, and it is the one your commercial team has to be able to hold in front of a head of security.

The power budget is the spec that decides everything

Recording 24/7 with a 4G link on standby costs energy, and on a solar camera every watt comes from two components: the battery and the panel. Across our AOV line, batteries run from 8000mAh to 20000mAh and panels are 8W or 15W. Nothing above those figures exists in the catalog — and that is exactly the kind of number a buyer should insist on getting in writing before signing, because an inflated datasheet gets paid for later in returns.

The sizing rule is simple. The panel doesn't have to cover an average day's consumption; it has to cover consumption through the longest overcast run the site sees. For continuous AOV operation in regions with a pronounced rainy season — southern Vietnam, the Central American coast, the Andean highlands in winter — the safe pairing is a 15W panel with a 20000mAh battery. The 8W and lower-capacity configurations have their place on sites with good year-round insolation, or on event-triggered recording schemes, but not for permanent AOV on a pole in partial shade.

Outdoors, every exterior model is IP66: sealed against dust and against pressurised water jets from any direction, which is what tropical rain and hose-down cleaning actually demand. If a client asks for a higher ingress rating, the right answer is to escalate it as an engineering enquiry, not to accept it in the quote. Field installation takes 5 to 10 minutes per camera, with no electrical work and no WiFi — which changes the deployment cost picture completely on projects running to dozens of points.

Resolution, storage, and what actually travels over the 4G link

The line standard is 1080p to 2K. 4K exists only as a custom or OEM development and should never be offered from a stock list. Local storage is microSD up to 128GB, which holds a rolling window of continuous recording.

One point is worth clearing up here, because it trips up newer integrators: on an AOV camera the 4G link does not stream video permanently. The continuous recording lives on the card; the network is used for live view on demand, for alerts and for event thumbnails. That split is precisely what keeps SIM data consumption and power draw under control. If the end user needs a longer archive than the card holds, retention gets solved on the integrator's side — scheduled backup or a cloud plan — not by asking the factory for a capacity the line doesn't support.

The AOV models in the catalog

The full catalog is 150 SKUs, with wholesale prices quoted per order, of which 49 are AOV models. The six below are the dual-lens units, the most requested configuration for AOV because they cover a wide view and a detail view from a single pole and a single installation:

The rest of the AOV line, including the single-lens and lower-capacity variants, is in the product catalog.

Commercial terms, OEM and lead times

Manufacturing is by Shenzhen Leksell, established in 2012, certified by TÜV Rheinland alongside CE, FCC and RoHS. The regional office is in Ho Chi Minh City.

OEM and private label are available on every model, including all 49 AOV units: logo, packaging, your own branded app, and spec adjustments to order. The route we recommend to a new distributor is to order 10 units of a single configuration, prove them out on the worst site in your portfolio — partial shade, rainy season, marginal 4G coverage — and only then scale into the 100-unit OEM order. Full volume terms are on the wholesale page, and territory arrangements are covered in the dealer program.

For a quote with model, quantity and destination: WhatsApp +86 188 1869 9870 or info@solaguard.net. Quantity, final pricing and lead time are always confirmed by someone on the sales team.