Controlware Communications Systems

Mission
With more than 200,000 spaces across more than 700 locations, National Car Parks (NCP) is today’s market leader in the provision of parking services. When it came to selecting a CCTV solutuion for the new car parking facility at St Pancras International NCP required a solution that met their exacting high standards. NCP turned to Controlware for a new system that had to be robust, provide high quality video images and be based on IP technology to take advantage of integration with external systems and support for new applications in the future.

Solution
The NCP car park at St Pancras International has in excess of 300 spaces and is protected by a 20 camera surveillance solution that includes transmission, management and recording systems. The solution is fully integrated into the main St Pancras International CCTV network so that video images and recorded footage can be viewed from the Station Control Room (SCR). This enables video surveillance to be more widely available to operators across the network, helping to reduce crime and improve safety for employees, commuters and visitors to the station.

Richard Talbot, Head of Rail Parking for NCP said “NCP takes the safety and security of our customers very seriously and we have been very pleased with the system at St Pancras. Since the car park opened in 2007 there has been no recorded crime, this has led to the award of the prestigious Park Mark safer Parking Award by the British Transport Police and British Parking Association”.

Result
The car park benefits from a modular IP system that is fully integrated, highly flexible and future proofed. A bespoke user-interface designed especially for NCP enables operators to easily control and manage CCTV video. Alarm management is more effectve since audible and visual indicators automatically bring video to the attention of the operators, initiating system functions such as high-quality recordings and distributing video. The solution also acts as a springboard for future applications and services providing an easy and cost-effective migration path not only for video management and recording but for new IP based technologies such as transcoding and Intelligent Video Analytics should these applications be required in the future.