What Is Hikvision AOV? Always-On Video Explained for Camera Importers

AOV means "Always-On Video" — and it is not proprietary to Hikvision

AOV stands for Always-On Video. It is a recording mode for battery and solar-powered cameras in which the camera keeps recording continuously, 24 hours a day, at low standby power, instead of sleeping until a PIR sensor is triggered. Hikvision uses the label across parts of its solar and 4G battery range, which is why "Hikvision AOV" is the phrase buyers type into a search box — but AOV describes a behaviour, not a brand. It is industry-generic in exactly the way PTZ, IP66 or H.265 are. Any factory can build an AOV camera, and many already do: 49 of the 150 SKUs in our own catalogue are AOV models. If you are sourcing, you are buying a capability that several manufacturers can quote, not a trademark you have to license.

That distinction is worth money at the negotiating table. Distributors who assume AOV is a single vendor's feature end up paying a brand premium for a recording mode that is available across the OEM market at wholesale prices.

How AOV actually records, and why the power budget is the whole story

A conventional solar camera spends most of its life asleep. A passive infrared sensor watches for a moving heat source; when it fires, the camera wakes, boots the image pipeline, and starts recording. That wake sequence is where the missed footage comes from — the first seconds of an event are gone before the sensor has finished deciding.

AOV removes the sleep state. The camera holds a continuous timeline, but runs it in a low-power standby profile — reduced frame rate, aggressive encoding, minimal processing — and uses on-device AI scene analysis to decide when something in frame is worth recording properly. When a person or vehicle enters the scene, the camera raises frame rate and quality for the duration of the event, then drops back down.

The result is a timeline with no holes in it. You still get high-quality event clips, but you also get the low-rate footage either side of them, which is what makes AOV genuinely different for an end user reconstructing what happened.

What AOV is not

AOV is not continuous full-quality recording on solar power. No battery and panel combination on the market runs a full-bitrate 24/7 stream off-grid indefinitely, and any supplier implying otherwise is describing a mains-powered camera. AOV is continuous coverage with intelligent quality allocation. Be precise about this with your customers — the expectation gap is the single most common source of returns on solar AOV cameras.

AOV vs PIR-triggered: what your customer actually notices

The two failure modes on the left are what drive AOV demand in agricultural and construction accounts. A PIR camera pointed at a cattle pen or a materials yard misses slow drift and misses anything happening at the edge of frame, and the customer discovers this only after an incident. AOV is the answer to "the camera was working and there is still no footage."

What AOV demands from the hardware

Continuous recording is a power problem before it is anything else. That is why our AOV line splits cleanly by energy budget rather than by feature list.

Forty-nine AOV SKUs, wholesale prices quoted per order. The line to read carefully is the third one: the SG-D42G-15F66 series pairs a 20000mAh battery with a 15W panel, and that is the configuration to quote when the site is high-latitude, heavily shaded, monsoon-affected, or when the customer wants AOV running through a long overcast run without intervention. The 8000mAh / 8W platforms carry AOV perfectly well in strong sun, and they are where the margin sits on volume orders.

Everything on the list is 1080p–2K. We do build 4K, but only as a custom or OEM order — it is not a stock configuration, and a supplier who offers you 4K AOV from stock at these prices is quoting something they cannot ship. Storage is microSD up to 128GB as standard, larger on custom orders. On AOV especially, ask what retention that actually buys at the customer's chosen settings, because a continuous timeline fills a card faster than an event-clip camera does; higher-capacity cards are available on request. Install is 5–10 minutes per camera — no grid power, no WiFi, a 4G SIM and a mounting bracket.

Weatherproofing is IP66 across the AOV range. If a project genuinely needs a higher ingress rating, say so at the RFQ stage rather than assuming it; it changes the housing, not just the datasheet line.

Sourcing AOV at wholesale instead of paying a brand premium

The practical question behind "what is Hikvision AOV" is usually "can I get this capability at a price that leaves me a margin." You can. The full product catalogue runs 150 SKUs, with wholesale prices quoted per order, built by Shenzhen Leksell — TÜV Rheinland certified, established 2012, with CE, FCC and RoHS on the export documentation your customs broker will ask for.

Commercial terms on AOV are the same as the rest of the range: 20% dealer margin from around 10 units, 30% from around 50. MOQ is 10 units for a trial order and 100 for OEM or ODM work. Samples move in 7–10 days by air; bulk is 25–40 days by sea; our Ho Chi Minh City office turns Vietnamese orders around in 7–10 business days.

Private label is available on all 49 AOV models, not just the entry SKUs — your logo on the housing, your branding in the app, your model numbering if you want it. For distributors building a house brand in Vietnam or Latin America, AOV is the right feature to lead with, because it is the one your customer can see working the moment they scrub back through a timeline. Terms and tiers are set out on the wholesale page.

Questions to put to any AOV supplier before the PO

1. Is the standby stream genuinely continuous, or is it long-duration clips stitched together? Ask for a recording exported across an hour with no events in it.
2. What raises quality — AI object classification, or basic pixel-change motion? Pixel-change triggers on rain and moving vegetation and will drain the battery.
3. What is the tested runtime in AOV mode with no sun, at the customer's settings? Not the PIR-mode figure on the marketing sheet.
4. Does the app expose an AOV/PIR toggle to the end user? Some sites want to switch modes seasonally.
5. What happens when the card fills? Overwrite policy on a continuous timeline matters far more than on an event-clip camera.
6. Which certifications ship with the unit, and can you see the actual certificates?
7. Is the AOV firmware the same on the OEM build as on the standard build? It should be.

A supplier who answers all seven without hedging is one you can sell against. If you want those answers for a specific project — battery and panel sizing, retention maths, or an OEM quote on any of the 49 AOV SKUs — the dealer programme is the fastest route in, or write to info@solaguard.net with the site conditions and unit count and we will size it properly rather than quoting a shelf part.

AOV is not a brand. It is a specification you can hold every supplier to, including us.