Video surveillance has a large market as the number of installed cameras around us can show. There are immediate commercial needs for smart video surveillance systems that can make use of the existing camera network (e.g. CCTV) for more intelligent security systems and to contribute in more applications (beside or) rather than security applications. This work introduces a new classification for smart video surveillance systems depending on their commercial applications. This paper highlights different links between the research and the commercial applications. The work reported here has both research and commercial motivations. Our goals are first to define a generic model of smart video surveillance systems that can meet requirements of strong commercial applications. Our second goal is to categorize different smart video surveillance applications and to relate capabilities of computer vision algorithms to the requirement of commercial application.