Wakefield Install Five Years On
23rd Sep 18
LCD Video Wall in continuous operation – UVS installed it's 1st ever UK control room video wall system at Wakefield Metropolitan Borough Council Urban Traffic and CCTV control room during September 2007.
In five years since installation, 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 UVS 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 the UVS proposal and solution was a ‘high-end’ offering requiring a higher investment in comparison to many of the responses that were proposing the use on non-industrial grade LCD technology.
However, almost five and a half years on, Darren Pollington explained that their conviction to go with the high end UVS solution had proved to have been the correct one:
“The UVS video wall system has provided outstanding reliability and operation during the past five and a half years and as you can see from the recent photographs taken it continues to do so. We have not had to change out 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 UVS.
We should also remember that at the time of the tender process back in 2007, competitors of UVS 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 by the UVS Netpix video wall controller since installation and continues today. With regard to the UVS controller, we have had zero component failures and the eyecon control software V3 we are using, even after five and a half years, remains the most flexible solution we have seen and provides the level of flexibility we need to respond to different circumstances”.
“A good example of this flexibility was a few years ago when we had serious flooding in the region. The operations on a shift basic created their own specific wall layouts 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 operations use the window properties of the control software to colour camera images for different regions or for specific activities that are on-going at any one time”.
As Wakefield was the very first installation for eyevis in the UK it has always been a special installation for us. 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, level of system integration between the security management systems and the video wall and the operational practises in the control room, have proved to be inspirational and motivational to many other clients that we have been allowed to show around the installation. For this we would sincerely like to thank Wakefield MBC for their cooperation during the past 6 years. It has been, and remains, an excellent working relationship.
