Lakeside Inn and Casino, located on Lake Tahoe in Nevada, offers 124 rooms of AAA Triple Diamond rated contemporary mountain lodge-style hotel accommodation. It features a 24-hour casino with slots, table games, keno, a lively sports book and a round-the-clock casino bar. Lakeside Inn and Casino has been open since 1985 and welcomes approximately 2 million visitors per year.
Technology & integration:
Results
- Simple, scalable migration from analogue to IP surveillance
- Surveillance hardware flexibility
- Robust, easy-to-use video management functionality meeting gaming requirements
- Single platform for future analytics deployment
Summary
Lakeside Inn and Casino pilots Aimetis Symphony™ software to reduce the threat of cheating, thefts and fraud on the casino floor.
Business challenge
Aimetis' surveillance solution is a robust, easy-to use video management functionality that meets gaming requirements |
Casinos around the globe face a constant threat of cheating, theft, fraud and other criminal and disruptive behaviour from both customers and employees. Since the 1960s, CCTV cameras have become commonplace in casinos, many installing hundreds or even thousands to monitor tables, dealers, slot machines, bars, doors and other critical areas. As technologies have shifted from analogue to IP however, most casinos are facing the challenge of determining how to upgrade their surveillance system without losing their investment in existing infrastructure.
Lakeside Inn & Casino has approximately 130 cameras monitoring the various areas within the casino. They were having an increasingly difficult time finding digital video recorders that met their requirements. Additionally, the Nevada Gaming Commission has very particular standards regarding video surveillance that must be adhered to, including a requirement to record video at 30 frames per second and store for a minimum of seven days. This creates a bandwidth and storage issue. Additionally, the Nevada Gaming Commission requires that all surveillance video must be able to be exported from the system for viewing on a standard TV or monitor.
Solution
Lakeside Inn & Casino selected Aimetis Symphony™ Intelligent Video Management software as their analogue to IP migration platform. As a pure software solution, Aimetis Symphony™ provides Lakeside Inn & Casino with the flexibility to not only use their existing cameras but also to select new cameras and encoders of their choice as required, allowing them to migrate to a full IP solution at their own pace. Additionally, Aimetis Symphony™ allows the casino unlimited ability to scale, both from a camera and storage point of view without locking them in to a certain hardware manufacturer. Currently the system has 7.5 TB of storage, which will soon be increased to 15 TB.
"The Aimetis software has been extremely stable, up and running from the day it was installed," said Roland Forslind, Information Systems Supervisor, Lakeside Inn & Casino. "Aimetis Symphony™ provides us with a very easy-to-use interface for monitoring and reviewing video from around the casino, and exporting the footage to a file that can be viewed by all individuals that require access to that video."
Aimetis Symphony™ also provides Lakeside Inn & Casino with the ability to simply upgrade their software licenses to deploy video analytics on selected cameras as future requirements dictate. "The ability to deploy video analytics in the future will allow us to save on bandwidth and storage costs as we can set the system to only record when activity occurs," adds Forslind. "Other foreseeable video analytics applications include being alerted of suspicious behaviours for real-time monitoring and mitigation as well as using applications, such as, people-counting, dwell time and traffic flow patterns to better plan the casino floor in a way that will increase revenues."
