Law Enforcement
Dorset Police needed video footage to be relayed from various town centre CCTV control rooms to their headquarters.
They also needed to be able to expand the system in the future to allow more feeds and viewers using portable devices to see the footage.
Installing a dedicated network was prohibitively expensive so instead we used the existing police IT narrow bandwidth network. We provided a combination of hardware and software and placed our encoder in each CCTV control room and a server at the force headquarters. We also installed viewer software for PC and Pocket PC devices. This allowed streaming to one or more viewers within and out-with the local intranet.
Dorset Police now has a system that receives feeds from all major town centres in the country, giving dispatchers access to local authority CCTV feeds and providing greater situational awareness when directing police officers. Senior officers can access the video over the force intranet allowing them to access an incident from their own desk, while local officers have access via a cellular link using the same Pocket PC devices that are used to access the Police National Computer, enabling them to see what dispatchers can see.
Dorset Police said;
"To put this service over a dedicated network would have cost £250,000. Essential Viewing's sophisticated technology allowed us to use our existing very narrow bandwidth networks to transmit high quality CCTV images. This provided every single police station in the county with data and telephony links. If it hadn't been for Essential Viewing, we wouldn't have CCTV pictures in the control room because we simply wouldn't have been able to afford it."