To see this in action visit your Events page when you have an event ‘in process’ and you’ll see that the event is now available for previewing and playback far more quickly.

The most important benefit of this upgrade is that you can now view your video footage very shortly after the event took place and can take immediate action if required.

Your still image database, which takes a little longer to process and will show after a little while, is meant to be used for close observation and evidence purposes at a later stage. With the upgrade we have taken this order of priority into account. Video footage will be at your fingertips when you need it to make urgent decisions whilst the detailed, individual stills will be available when you come to collate the evidence you may be looking for.

The new preview state in the Events list

As we’ve said in previous posts we’re taking updates slowly to ensure that downtime is minimised, but there will inevitably be some from time to time as we roll out more updates. We’ll always let you know via a message on your SecurityStation account.

As ever, if you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear. Create a ticket via the Help tab, or call us. We always like to talk!

The new easy Scheduling feature

Today, we have pushed out our new scheduling feature for plug and play (PnP) cameras (Axis and Panasonic), responding to calls from many users of SecurityStation for more flexibility in recording. It is now possible to set up a recording and alerting schedule for each individual plug and play camera in your account.

Up until now, when a camera was added to SecurityStation its recording was ‘armed’ 24/7, meaning that any events triggered at any time of the day would be recorded, and alerts emailed to your users. Many SecurityStation users have asked for the flexibility to set timeframes where their cameras are not armed for recording, such as when they are in the office and their cameras are triggering frequently. This kind of event behaviour can use up your event allowances quickly as well as cause an email overload.

How does the new scheduling feature work?

The new scheduling feature works when you select start and stop recording timeframes on selected days of the week in order to build up a schedule where the camera is both armed and disarmed for recording and alerting (though camera offline alerts are unaffected by schedules).

We’ve built the scheduling system around a scenario where cameras are disarmed 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday – the most common schedule times, but it is flexible. You can, for instance, set schedules that run around the clock, or operate for only 15 minutes per day. The flexibility is there to do what you need, up to a maximum of 7 scheduled time frames, and for each camera individually. On top of this you can overide any active schedule at any time by simply turning off alerts and recording with the recording and alerts on/off button on your Dashboard. Reactivating alerts and recording in the same way kicks all schedules back into action.

How do I create a schedule?

Creating schedules is easy. You access the scheduling page either from your camera’s edit page, available from the Dashboard. Let’s take the 9-5 scenario as our example. SecurityStation allows you to set start (arm) and stop (disarm) timeframes down to an interval of 15 minutes. So, to arm your camera for recording with the standard working hours of Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm you would set three schedule timeframes as follows:

• Monday – Friday 0000 to 0900
• Monday – Friday 1700 to 2400
• Saturday and Sunday 0000 to 2400

Because in SecurityStation schedules are ‘inclusive’, not ‘exclusive’, we’re choosing only the time frames where we want the camera to be recording and alerting. Outside these hours we don’t want detected motion to create events in SecurityStation, so we leave these timeframes unaccounted (remember, we don’t want events generated during office hours).

To create your first schedule click the button Create a schedule and a new set of fields appears for selecting which days of the week your schedule will be active, plus the arm/disarm timeframe on those days.

The "create a schedule" popout box

After creating the Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm scenario as above your schedule should look like this:

The Scheduling User Interface

You can have up to 7 separate time frames running per camera in SecurityStation, allowing for a greater degree of flexibility in accommodating the needs of both companies and home users.

Of course, if you choose not to record to a schedule that’s fine. Your cameras will be armed 24/7.

About the Scheduling UI

We have also made some small UI improvements in a number of areas including:

• A new clock icon on the Dashboard depicts when a schedule is active;
• The addition of a delete camera icon on the Dashboard in order to free up some space for the link to scheduling for each camera;

Dashboard camera widget

• Change of test access button – this button is a heavily used and useful feature and we’ve placed a bit more emphasis on it;
• Change of camera reboot icon – we felt the previous icon was a little confusing and could result in unintentional camera reboots.

Camera edit page UI changes

Do you have feedback on the new feature?

Do you like the new scheduling feature? Do you have any suggested improvements? Either way we’d like to hear from you. Let us know in the comments below.

When an IP camera is connected to the SecurityStation VSaaS service, the camera and the service talk to each other constantly in a kind of permanent handshake. This handshake, or ‘heartbeat’, as we call it here, is constructed using a tiny amount of data (so no worries about how much data your camera is transferring) and means that SecurityStation is always aware of your camera’s online status.

Connections using the Internet are rarely guaranteed for 100% uptime, especially for home and small business broadband connections. In our experience, Internet connections are frequently dropping off and coming back on again, and when you throw Wi-Fi, multiple ISPs, Internet backbone issues, TCP/IP connection drops, router malfunctions and more into the mix, no connection is really online all of the time. This has effects on the efficacy of the heartbeat system in SecurityStation. What good would it be if it warned you for every one of these drop-offs? You’d be bombarded with emails and warnings.

So, the SecurityStation heartbeat is built intelligently and factors this into its operation. You won’t be bombarded, but you will be notified when there is real downtime. The system checks and double-checks before emailing you.

The situation is analogous to setting up video motion detection (VMD) and this concept informed us when we created the SecurityStation heartbeat. With VMD you choose a detection area and overall sensitivity for detection in your ‘scene’ and the goal is to only have the camera trigger or alert when it detects something real like an intruder, not when, for instance, a nearby tree is blowing in the wind. This VMD noise is the bane of most CCTV systems (not ours, we hope) and various architectures, clever systems and complicated analytics have been developed to get around the problem. Nevertheless, it remains a problem.

And so it is with the SecurityStation heartbeat. When you are alerted that your camera is offline, it most likely is offline. When you are alerted that it’s back online, it most likely is online. All cameras will drop off from time to time, which is another reason why we recommend using a plug-and-play IP camera with SecurityStation. The heartbeat is more reliable with plug-and-play and the two systems work seamlessly together.

The SecurityStation heartbeat is especially important for surveillance where remote monitoring is paramount. You can always be sure of your camera’s status and can rely on SecurityStation to deliver the right information. That said, you can also turn it off, if required.

In the meantime, SecurityStation has at its core a rock-solid live view system which is indeed full-featured, cross-browser compatible, capable of supporting multiple resolutions, and able to display up to 16 different video feeds simultaneously. These feeds can be from plug-and-play cameras or manually configured cameras from several supported brands, all in different locations, all displayed at the same time. The remote monitoring viewer intelligently adapts to the number of live-capable cameras in your account at any time (inaccessible cameras are also supported) so no blank spots take up valuable real estate on your monitor. If you want to, you can even go full screen (with both the multiple view and single-camera view) for that welcome touch of traditional VMS.

Remote monitoring is a core part of every security system and SecurityStation eliminates the need for local installation of additional software. SecurityStation operates in real-time to ensure you won’t miss a thing, no matter where you are. Without a fully integrated web-based service like ours, the time delay between receiving an alert and logging on to view what’s happening is often too long. SecurityStation ties together alerts and immediate visual monitoring with a single click, providing rapid access to the information you need.

Turning off remote recording does not affect live monitoring, so SecurityStation can be used solely as a remote monitoring platform. That’s just what some of our customers choose to do, eschewing complicated local setup and dynamic DNS in favour of a quick to setup plug-and-play solution. The system’s heartbeat facility (designed to alert you if the camera drops offline, and again when it comes back online) coupled with its remote monitoring capability results in a robust live monitoring tool for a wide variety of requirements.

SecurityStation makes the process of web-based monitoring and recording intuitive and simple. We’ll be radically updating SecurityStation’s remote monitoring system in the coming months, but our focus will always be on that quick, intuitive core usability that our users know and love.

Abstract view of camera resolution - not to scale

We get a lot of questions about resolution in SecurityStation, particularly on the subject of our live view. Most of those questions are about the perceived small size of the live view, so we’ve put together this post by way of a explanation.

A security system is no good if it cannot be trusted to be reliable. That is a given. With our service being web-based it relies on a connection to your IP camera across the internet. As a result, the effectiveness of SecurityStation is somewhat in the hands of your ISP. Those connections all behave differently: some may be leased lines, some DSL, some fibre, but the important factor for us is that we don’t know what actual capacity our customers have (and, let’s be honest, 9 times out of 10 you won’t either, because ISPs make this information difficult to come by) and that capacity will fluctuate over time and will be affected by how other things on the network are utilising the connection.

With regard to resolution and event recording in particular we are up-front about the limitations and have a simple strategy: it must work first time. Because we don’t make any assumptions about how much data can be squeezed out through your connection we take the simplest approach and set both your live view resolution and recorded event resolutions to a low default setting to make sure that when you connect your cameras they ‘just work’.

Of course, in SecurityStation it’s easy to change these default settings to get both higher resolution recorded footage and higher-quality live views using lower compression rates, and we encourage you to adjust these settings to get the best balance between quality, resolution and frame rate. SecurityStation is only as good as the settings that you put into it, though our default ‘goldilocks’ settings aim to dramatically minimise the chances that the speed of your internet connection becomes an issue.

That’s not to say we are standing still in these areas. SecurityStation is under constant development and will change as bandwidth availability inexorably increases. We’ve designed SecurityStation to take advantage of these ISP level changes as they occur and on top of this are actively developing towards using more bandwidth-efficient methods to get your security data into SecurityStation.

Some of the more notable improvements include:

• Various mobile devices are now correctly recognised (i.e. you will see the mobile interface rather than the full screen UI);
• Events can no longer be turned back on when alerts and recording are set globally to off. This means that it’s no longer possible for plug and play cameras to (in a small number of cases) be in anomalous states, as was the case before;
• We’ve prevented the unlocking of aspect ratio on the live view for smaller image sizes. The unlock aspect ratio facility is great when you want to run a live view fullscreen to match the aspect ratio of your monitor. However, we found that doing this with smaller image resolutions resulted in lower quality output than some of you required.

In addition to these fixes, we’ve received feedback that some SecurityStation users prefer to be able to save their login details for quicker login the next time they visit the site. As a result we have now enabled the saving of login details in the browser, if required, both on desktop browsers and on iPhone/iPad and other handheld devices. This is particularly useful for checking events on handheld devices where entering login credentials can be, let’s face it, a bit of a chore, and slows down the often urgent need to view a live camera or watch some recorded footage.

We’ve also made some more behind-the-scenes changes to improve the stability of SecurityStation. We hope you find the fixes improve your SecurityStation experience, and please continue to let us know what features you’d like to see in future updates to service, either in the comments below or via securitystation.com.

We recently announced that our UK users were eligible for a FREE (completely free, no adverts or trial period) SecurityStation account for 1 camera. Today, we’re extending that to a long list of European Union countries too. Read on for more details.

If you live in one of these countries you, like our UK users, can now sign-up for a free SecurityStation 1 camera account:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Ireland (ROI)
• Italy
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Portugal
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland

Head over to our sign-up page now for your free account.

This new feature was built for customers with wireless cameras to pro-actively check whether their camera is connected and online in SecurityStation, avoiding the necessary wait (albeit short) before SecurityStation itself picks up the camera. In short, if the camera is connected clicking ‘Test access’ will immediately bring the camera online within the account. It takes the guess-work out of camera installation and is particularly useful for plug and play where feedback from the camera is limited.

We’ll be hooking this up to work with manually added (port forwarded) cameras shortly.

You’ll find the new test access feature on the camera edit page.

Right now only two cameras are supported for wireless operation – the BL-C230 and the BL-C121 – but we will be adding to that support in the coming months.

SecurityStation users with either of these cameras will see a new ‘Wireless settings’ section on their camera edit page. Connected cameras already operating wireless are accommodated as SecurityStation intelligently copes with this and displays the existing wireless SSID and encryption type. The wireless encryption key, however, is not displayed for security reasons.
Cameras not operating wirelessly can now be easily made wireless.

In addition we pushed out some important updates and fixes including IE9 support for consistent event playback, a new ‘test access’ feature, a fix to the clickable unprocessed event bug, some iPhone fixes and various important payment mode issues are now also dealt with.

Along with the recent addition of plug and play and Digital PTZ for Axis IP cameras, SecurityStation just got a little bit better.

Panasonic BL-C121
Panasonic BL-C230

While the ability to pause and take snapshots in SecurityStation has been present from the beginning, the inability to remotely operate digital PTZ in cameras has, up until now, been a restriction.

In many scenarios, having the ability to digitally manipulate the camera’s field of view is a distinct advantage. So we’re proud to announce that SecurityStation now supports digital PTZ in the following Axis plug and play models, with more to come:

Axis P3343
Axis P3343-V
Axis P3343-VE
Axis P3344
Axis P3344-V
Axis P3344-VE
Axis P1343
Axis P1343-E
Axis M3014

To give you an idea of what this new feature will look like on your screen, here is a snapshot:

We hope you find this new feature useful. We’re constantly looking to improve SecurityStation for our users, so if you have any feedback about our implementation of digital PTZ, or any other aspects of the service, please let us know.