For any organisation still using analog cameras, SecuritySpy offers an easy upgrade path to a digital solution, allowing you to keep your analog cameras while gradually moving to a system based on megapixel IP cameras.
The Raven Hotel was in exactly this situation, and used SecuritySpy as their video surveillance solution. Below is their experience of SecuritySpy, in their own words.
The Raven Hotel has been trading since 1938 and with a bar, restaurant, a 19 bedroom hotel and a large ballroom & wedding venue there is a lot of space to cover with CCTV. Our 16 analogue camera system performed well but we had endless problems with unreliable DVRs. We even switched to a manufacture recommended by the local police force but it still let us down.
Being avid Mac users we were desperate to put in place a reliable, Mac based CCTV system, but such an old, large building meant that installing networked enabled cameras would have been slow and expensive process.
By using an Axis video server and SecuritySpy, we now have all the benefits of a networked CCTV system using our old cameras. We can monitor our cameras on or off the premises using iPhones and iPads and retrieving footage is much quicker and easier than it has been with any other system we have used. More importantly, Security Spy has never let us down, not once! We now plan to extend our CCTV coverage by adding a few extra networked cameras.
The quality is fairly typical for analog cameras; the hotel will be gradually switching to IP cameras, which offer far higher quality. Click for full-sized version.
I do love reading SecuritySpy case studies. I’ve been using SecuritySpy on and off since 2005 and wish I had the opportunity to install it on such a large scale.
I would love to hear more about the “mixed” solution, and the kinds of things that can help bridge this gap, as I review our options for upgrading from older, less capable packaged DVR systems to something more flexible, like the SecuritySpy implementation we have at our main offices.
If you already have analog cameras that you want to use with SecuritySpy, you’ll need one or more analog-to-digital conversion boxes. Axis video servers are ideal for this (e.g. M7014).
You can of course run these alongside IP cameras in SecuritySpy, and gradually replace the old analog cameras with IP cameras as you go on.