UK City Migrates Analog Camera System To Gentec IP Platform

  • May 08, 2008

Genetec announced recently that the City of Manchester, United Kingdom, selected Omnicast 4.1 for a major system upgrade project. With approximately 700 analog cameras spread throughout the city, the City of Manchester is gradually migrating to IP, and all cameras will eventually be managed by the IP platform.

Working with C-ways Limited, a UK-based IT Integrator, the City of Manchester selected Omnicast for the flexibility and benefits offered by its new Federation feature.

“Where before we could only use either unicast or multicast functions, the Federation will allow us to use both those functionalities simultaneously, offering better management of bandwidth,” said David Walsh, technical installations manager from the City of Manchester’s Command and Control Center.

With five control centers located throughout the city to manage video from their older fixed analog systems, the Federation also has given the City of Manchester the ability to reroute all video back to one central monitoring station through IP. As each system is progressively migrated and rerouted back to the central monitoring station, there will no longer be a need for the other control centers, thus contributing to significantly reduced operation costs.

Additionally, total flexibility of the system has given them the freedom to work with their existing infrastructure and any hardware providers they deem fit. According to Walsh “this is very important when spending public money.”

One month into the implementation of the Omnicast system, the City of Manchester has already migrated 30 cameras from the Greater Manchester Police and 20 cameras from the city’s largest municipal park over to the Omnicast platform.

“Unlike an analog installation, the systems were up and running within hours and our partners could not be happier with the new system and its many benefits,” Walsh said.

Although in initial installation stages, the City of Manchester has plans to continue populating the Omnicast platform with existing cameras and is also looking into third-party integration with video and audio analytics partners.

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