Control Rooms: On the Go – Non Stop

Following the formation of Eyevis UK in the Summer of 2007, the company installed its first ever UK control room video wall system at Wakefield Metropolitan Borough Council Urban Traffic and CCTV control room during September 2007, six years ago. Since the installation was completed, the control room and video wall system have been in constant 24/7 365 days a year operation, helping to keep the council's regions and inhabitants safe and to record video evidence that has been used in thousands of court prosecutions to bring people to justice.

When Eyevis was selected by the council in 2007, following a detailed commercial and technical evaluation process, the Wakefield evaluation team, led by the Operations Manager for Enforcement, Mr Darren Pollington, noted that their proposal and solution was a ‘high-end' offering, requiring a higher investment in comparison to many of the responses that were proposing the use of non-industrial grade LCD technology.

However, six years on, Darren Pollington explains that their conviction to go with this high-end solution has proved to have been the correct one. "The Eyevis video wall system has provided outstanding reliability and operation during the past six years and, as you can see from the recent photographs taken, it continues to do so. We have not had to change a single LCD display unit out of the fifteen in operation, only to exchange some power supplies and fans, which have been managed by our incumbent CCTV maintenance contractor 2020 Vision with the continued excellent support from Eyevis UK. We should also remember that at the time of the tender process back in 2007, our competitors were telling us that it was technically impossible to simultaneously display 166x CCTV images on a video wall in real time. As you can see, this has been achieved continuously by the Netpix video wall controller. With regard to this controller, we have had zero component failures and the Eyecon control software V3 we are using, even after six years, remains the most flexible solution we have seen and provides the level of flexibility we need to respond to different circumstances."

Personal Arrangement
"A good example of this flexibility was a few years ago when we had serious flooding in the region. The operators created their own specific wall layouts on a shift-by-shift basis to monitor specific cameras that were providing very useful information on water levels and where we needed to coordinate resources with the emergency and rescue services. As you will see on the video wall layouts, our operators use the window properties of the control software to color the frame of camera images for different regions or for specific activities that are on-going at any one time."

Steve Murphy, Managing Director of Eyevis UK commented "As Wakefield was the very first installation for us in the UK, it has always been a special installation. As Darren explained, it has followed our other UK projects and proved to have been extremely reliable. In addition, the whole Wakefield project, from the overall control room design, the level of system integration between the security management systems and the video wall and the operational practices in the control room, have proved to be inspirational and motivational to many other clients that we have shown around the installation who were considering and preparing for their own control room upgrade. To this end, we would like to sincerely thank Wakefield MBC for their cooperation during the last six years. It has been and remains an excellent working relationship.