Norwich City Football Club (NCFC) featured in our December 2016 print magazine. Here’s a case study of how, to comply with Football Association (FA) standards, the Championship club recently upgraded its CCTV, including a video management system (VMS) from FLIR Systems.
Norwich City Football Club (also known as the Canaries because of a history of breeding the birds in that area, or City for short) is based in the centre of Norwich, and was in the Premier League in the 2015-16 season.
The club has regular gates of 27,000; hence the need for adequate security monitoring, for football and other events to run smoothly and safely. Norwich City decided in 2016 to upgrade its surveillance, for managing crowds inside and outside the stadium, to keep any supporter aggression under control, detect people illegally filming the football match, and intervene in time where needed. The club sought also to fully meet the safety standards of the Football Association’s Safety Advisory Group. Failure to comply to these guidelines could result in postponed matches, and the requirement to pay for more police. City sought a scalable video surveillance solution, using the latest camera, server and video storage.
For a number of years, the club had been working with Check Your Security Ltd, a Norfolk based installer, specialising in IP security. Check Your Security designs, installs commissions and maintains CCTV, access control, high-security perimeter fencing and other associated disciplines. Andy Batley, Security Manager at NCFC says: “Check Your Security has never failed us and they know how critical CCTV is to our operation. Since they specialize in IPCCTV, we asked their advice on what options were open to us and we were staggered by the choice and scope of what they came up with.”
Check Your Security believes in offering customer service and choice, providing options to fit client needs. After consideration, NCFC chose the technology from FLIR Systems. According to the club, using a system from a single manufacture with feature-rich settings made it a straightforward decision.
The club opted for the FLIR Latitude VMS, which provides forensic quality imaging and, for operation, dedicated, web-based and mobile client software. The security monitoring also includes a range of hardware components, including FLIR Quad HD resolution cameras, allowing security teams to respond to security incidents in the event of an emergency. FLIR’s Latitude VMS makes use of a range of cameras that adjust to preset locations, allowing for real-time coverage of the areas in and around the Carrow Road stadium.
FLIR adds that Latitude’s scalable architecture supports systems of any size or architecture for use throughout enterprises, across multiple sites. Latitude offers viewing, playback, search and export, while maintaining scalability and usability. Now, Norwich City has the ability to add thousands of cameras should the football club wish, plus it can integrate third-party security and analytical systems
The new system uses the existing cabling and is truly scalable, allowing the club to connect all existing cameras with additional high-definition cameras, as well as future extensions of any part of their system when required.
Quad HD resolution imaging
The FLIR Quasar camera line includes Quad HD resolution sWDR bullet cameras. These Quasar models offer 76 per cent more detail than HD1080 the makers say and the same forensic zoom as legacy 5MP cameras. Using its broadcast, motion-processing based architecture, the Quasar Quad HD camera series delivers predictable storage, lower utility costs and a reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it’s claimed.
