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What The O2 really really wants

When tickets for the Spice Girls' December concert at The O2 arena in London went on sale, all 20,000 were snapped up in 38 seconds.  Each and every one of the concert-goers will be counted in and out of The O2 by video analytics software from Ipsotek.

The O2, owned and operated by AEG Europe, has installed Ipsotek's people-counting system across dedicated cameras at its main entrances so that AEG's management and tenants benefit from hour-by-hour, day-by-day analysis.  Ipsotek's software was chosen for its ability to provide an accurate, automated headcount covering both steady streams of visitors and sudden influxes during high-profile events.

Tim Rawlins, Operations Director at The O2, said, "We were impressed that Ipsotek could cover multiple entrances with a high degree of accuracy.  Naturally our principal reasons for wanting to know how many people are within The O2 concern health, safety and staffing levels, but as London's major entertainment destination we also need to measure footfall for our tenants."

He continued, "Data is freely available to the operations room and Ipsotek has set up trigger points on visitor numbers so that we receive emails at certain threshold figures and when we are approaching maximum occupancy."

"We are able to export figures in convenient formats - including spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts - to a range of business customers who may want templates that tell them about footfall during particular periods.  The Ipsotek interface could not be easier to use and I have running totals available to me 24 hours a day."

The O2 presented considerable challenges, notably the need to count clusters of people who might be walking three or more abreast through the same doorway.  In addition to totals, the client needed reports on peaks and troughs at the entrance.  Ipsotek's combination of software and hardware was one of few offerings able to analyse busy CCTV images and convert the data into meaningful statistics. 

The venue's management knew there would be bursts of activity in the run-up to a major concert but a counting system using people mass was not acceptable to them.  They also felt that manual counts would be inaccurate and time-consuming.  Cameras from ADT have been positioned above the entrance points and the system is networked to provide a count for individual or combined doors.

Chris Gomersall, CEO of Ipsotek, said, "Few, if any, commercially available systems possess either the advanced analytics or the processing power to cope with the demanding conditions at The O2.  We are delighted to have such an iconic London landmark on our client list. "