Optibase PTV System Helps Police Fight Crime

HERZLIYA, Israel - Humberside Police, UK has upgraded their current IPTV system with Optibase’s carrier-grade, MPEG-4 H.264 solution. Together with local UK partner, Cotswold Communications, Optibase’s delivered a system that includes MediaGateway encoding platforms, which will be streaming feeds coming from the police helicopter to multiple PC clients across the force’s network.

For Humberside police, the idea of officers watching video footage in their fight against crime is not a new one, in fact they have been using and IPTV system since 2003. With this system, the Humberside police are able to effectively deal with the challenge of having the right decision making resources at the site of a crime or an accident.

The force transmits live video feeds from a helicopter, thus providing coverage across an area of 1,365 square miles around the city of Kingston Upon Hull and the Humber estuary on England’s east coast. The feeds are distributed across the force’s LAN and can be monitored on multiple PC clients by any authorized personnel in real-time.

“One of the major drawbacks of our current solution is the quality of the MPEG-1 video. When filming footage from a helicopter, the picture quality is a key factor in being able to pick up on the on-goings on the ground.“ said Mr. Graham Dawson, Head of Information Services, Humberside Police. “By using MPEG-4 compression we are able to provide much better picture quality, without compromising the low bit rates required for us to distribute the feeds across our network.”

Mr. Dawson added “Optibase was the obvious choice for us since their encoding technology was used in the Cisco IPTV system that we had. When we decided to upgrade our system, we went directly to the source of the video technology.”

“We are very pleased to be working directly with the Humberside Police to upgrade their IPTV system.” Said Udi Shani, Executive VP International sales at Optibase “This is not the first time that we have been approached to upgrade an existing IPTV system with our advanced video technology. Optibase has a solution that includes streaming platforms as well as interactive PC clients, which is specifically designed for this market.”

Optibase’s selection by the Humberside Police is part of the new direction of expansion for the company focusing complete video solutions for law-enforcement, government and enterprise organizations. Optibase is able to use it’s expertise in order to create cost effective, telco-grade systems with the latest compression technology.