We will be working on a re-development of SecurityStation and further information on the changes will follow in the months to come. Stay tuned if you want to follow what we are up to.

We would like to say a big thank you to all the people that have used the service over the past year or so. We know you liked the service a great deal and we’ve listened to your comments on how we can make the service better.

Frank Crouwel
Managing Director of NW Systems Group

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.

We will, as ever, seek to minimise the amount of time the service is offline and ensure that when the service is back online your experience is better than ever.

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.

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.