This update  brings to a conclusion our current efforts to improve processing times for events. We have more updates in the works and hope to bring further significant improvements to SecurityStation within the next few months.

As from 11am GMT on Thursday 22nd December 2011 allowances will be as follows:

FREE ACCOUNT

• 1 camera maximum
• Up to 50 recorded events in your account at any one time
• Up to 250 recorded events per month

PAID FOR ACCOUNT

• Just £5 / €5 / $5.99 per month for up to 2 cameras / 2,000 events pm
• Then just £5 / €5 / $5.99 per month per additional camera / 1,000 events per month
• 16 cameras maximum
• Up to 16,000 recorded events per month

The number of users remains unlimited for both account types and there are no minimum contract terms or tie-ins.

The change will only affect free account holders. Paying customers will be unaffected.

IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION TO USERS OF FREE ACCOUNTS

If you are an existing free account holder, then you will see your event allowances change as set out above on Thursday 22nd December. The change will be automatic.

To prevent your account reaching its limit immediately at the time of the change, you should ensure your account will be within the limits of the new event allowances before 11am on Thursday 22nd December. Note that no existing event footage will be deleted, even if your account exceeds the new allowances.  However, if your account does exceed the new allowances, the system will not capture any new event footage. We therefore recommend that you take a short while to bring your account in line with the new allowances.

Why are we making this change?

We are making this change as there has been a growing, albeit relatively small, number of non-paying users deploying the system as a 24/7 permanent recording tool. This is not what VSaaS products are for and we’d not anticipated people making use of the system in this way. We are taking this step to curb this unintended use of the free account. The vast majority of our customers use the system as VSaaS is intended to be used and those users will largely remain unaffected by this change.

If you have any questions, please contact us using our online form, or call us on +44 151 633 2111.

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!

We have seen a large uptake of SecurityStation in the last six months and are now processing thousands of video events each day. This has required us to upscale the capacity of SecurityStation. Core updates have now been made, which will allow much quicker event processing in the future. There’s still some work to be done to complete the capacity update, but it will soon be ready. In the meantime, code improvements have sped up the event processing a little. Soon SecurityStation will be faster than ever.

On top of these updates we’ve made a couple of smaller, but helpful changes:

• Saved events no longer appear in the main event list. To access saved events go to the saved events tab. This means there’s no inadvertent deletion of saved events from the main events tab.
• For plug and play cameras it’s now possible to easily move between cameras when creating schedules. Some of you thought the scheduling process took too long, so we thought we’d speed it up a little with the addition of a dropdown to choose which camera to set a schedule for next.

Over the coming weeks we’ll keep you updated with improvements via this blog and our Twitter feed.

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.

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.

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.

As well as being able to access the service itself, SecurityStation.com is the best place to find out exactly how SecurityStation works, with its time-saving and cost-effective setup, user-friendly, web-based interface and easy to use recording and playback features.

We’ve also assembled a list of IP security cameras that work with SecurityStation, making this the easiest way to put together a monitoring or security solution that will work straight out of the box. Once you have picked your camera, you can purchase it directly from the Network Webcams store.

And the cost for this simple, easy, feature-packed service? Just £5 per month. Visit our homepage now for more information and even more reasons why you should choose SecurityStation.