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.

Secondly, we offer a choice of connection methods. We have developed, in-house, a unique plug-and-play system that already works for Panasonic BL- and BB-range cameras and is currently in the process of being rolled out to a range of Axis cameras. If you prefer to configure your cameras manually that option is also available through our manual configuration facility. Why offer both of these methods? Flexibility. Plug and play is quicker and easier and provides the same feature set as manually configuring your cameras, but experienced customers with knowledge of router configurations, port forwarding and dynamic DNS might require a finer level of control that plug and play does not offer.

Our working process has been about tailoring SecurityStation to our customers. Where it is possible and beneficial, we want to provide choice. That’s been our philosophy during the development of SecurityStation, and it will continue to be so as we refine and expand the service.

With SecurityStation our approach to VSaaS is a paradigm shift away from clunky desktop-style interfaces and on to warmer, friendlier, more perceptive user-focused surveillance. SecurityStation is a web-centric application designed to bring VSaaS well and truly into the online realm. It’s a true online application in the sense that it retains only the best, most appropriate features from traditional, locally held security systems, and as we go, SecurityStation will grow with the web as its platform and with the browser at its heart (more on how SecurityStation breaks the VSaaS mould will come soon).

SecurityStation’s stripped-back approach means you can understand how the system works very quickly and you’re no more than a click away from what you’re after. Its cross-browser support means there’s no obscure installation procedure of any kind – it just works – while its support for mobile devices, whilst currently only covering the iPhone and iPad, will grow over time.

We’ve designed SecurityStation around ourselves as a typical business with a requirement for online monitoring of its security cameras. As a business owner it gives me peace of mind. As an end user it does exactly what I need it to do and it does it without fuss or complication.

It couldn’t be easier.

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.