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.

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.

Many IP cameras are sold with free 1 channel recording software. Users are required to install this software on their PC and keep this running to record footage and play it back. The new, free SecurityStation account does away with this requirement.

Owners of IP cameras can sign up to a 1 camera SecurityStation account free of charge and record and play back video footage without the need to install software or keep their PC running 24 hours a day. SecurityStation is web-based, meaning video recordings are stored on remote servers managed by us, whilst playback is done simply via the user’s SecurityStation account. There is no need to install any software.

Common software features, such as live viewing, e-mail alerts on motion detection and frame rate and image quality configurations are available within the SecurityStation service also. Benefits of SecurityStation over installed recording software are that no computer is required for recording or storage of footage, access to live and recorded video is much easier (also from mobile devices) and set up is a doddle with plug & play.

The free 1 camera SecurityStation account is available now, find out more about hosted video or sign up to get 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.

The widening range of supported cameras means that SecurityStation plug and play has become available for camera installations of all sorts, including indoor and outdoor, static and pan-tilt-zoom as well as scenarios requiring vandal resistant or unobtrusive camera solutions. With Axis and Panasonic being our best-selling brands of IP cameras, SecurityStation plug and play has now become accessible to a huge user base.

The main benefit of plug and play is ease of use, both for setup as well as for modifying important camera settings. SecurityStation plug and play is for non-technical customers who wish to use cameras but don’t yet do so because of technical barriers. SecurityStation plug and play makes IP-based CCTV available to everyone.

See the full list of cameras with Plug and Play support in SecurityStation.