Stadiums and arenas have evolved beyond being mere event venues to becoming vibrant year-round hubs for concerts, conferences, and various community activities.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium exemplifies this transformation, with its commercial revenue in 2025 increasing from £255.2 million to £277.1 million. This growth can be attributed to hosting diverse events such as NFL franchises, significant boxing matches, and a Beyoncé concert series.
With increased activity, the challenge of ensuring the safety of visitors and staff has grown more complex. Security is no longer solely about incident response; it has become a strategic aspect of venue management. Stadium leadership now tailors security measures to varied event types and risk levels, ensuring compliance with health and safety standards, maintenance, and other operational needs.
Venue operators must soon comply with the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, known as Martyn's Law, which will come into effect in spring 2027. This legislation requires operators of large venues to enhance their preparedness while maintaining positive visitor experiences.
Martyn's Law, named after a victim of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, mandates that venues consider terrorism risks and implement appropriate measures to mitigate potential attacks. For venues accommodating over 800 attendees, physical protection measures like video surveillance and access controls are crucial. AI-powered video solutions are integral to fulfilling these requirements as part of a broader readiness strategy.
Traditional video surveillance has been central to security, but its effectiveness often depends on human operators managing numerous video feeds. AI-powered surveillance systems have transformed this process by focusing operators on genuine threats, such as suspicious activity or crowd congestion. These systems provide alerts, allowing operators to address incidents quickly and prevent escalation. Ground teams benefit from AI insights to track individuals or vehicles of interest effectively.
Advanced cameras offer high-definition resolutions, adaptable to various surveillance needs. AI video analytics enhance operators' situational awareness, enabling them to monitor crowd movements, identify bottlenecks, and react swiftly during emergencies.
Sharing information on threats with on-site personnel and emergency services ensures a coordinated response.
AI-driven surveillance allows operators to set alerts based on multiple analytics triggers, refining response times. Post-event investigations are expedited by using metadata to search video footage swiftly. Some systems facilitate a semantic search, akin to generative AI tools, allowing operators to locate precise information.
Modern venue security extends beyond traditional boundaries, as stadiums are often part of larger entertainment districts. AI-enabled video surveillance ensures situational awareness across diverse settings, helping operators anticipate and mitigate risks before they escalate.
AI-powered video analytics benefits various departments beyond security, enhancing marketing, sales, and operations. By monitoring crowd flow, vehicle movements, and congestion, operators can streamline event operations and enhance visitor experiences. This intelligence is crucial for multi-use venues hosting differing events, from sports matches to corporate gatherings.
With the imminent enforcement of Martyn's Law, venue leaders must act promptly to strengthen their security strategies. Investing in AI-driven video capabilities transforms security from a reactive role to a proactive, value-generating function, meeting the demands of modern multi-use event spaces and improving the visitor experience.
Stadiums and arenas are no longer places that come to life only on an event day. Increasingly, they are becoming year-round hubs for concerts, conferences, hospitality, retail, and community activity.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is one such example of a venue generating additional revenue and audiences beyond football matches, with its 2025 commercial income rising from £255.2 million to £277.1 million, due to hosting four National Football League (NFL) franchises, high-profile boxing events, and a Beyoncé summer concert series.
Positive visitor experience
Yet, as these venues grow more complex and multifaceted, so does the challenge of keeping visitors and staff safe throughout the year. Security is no longer simply about responding to incidents.; Instead, it has become a strategic function that enables stadium leadership to tailor security to different event types and risk levels, keep on top of health and safety and maintenance, and add value to marketing, sales, operations, and more.
More pointedly, venue operators will soon have to comply with the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, better known as Martyn's Law, which received Royal Assent in April 2025 and is expected to come into force in spring 2027. With less than a year before implementation is anticipated, organisations responsible for large publicly accessible venues are increasingly assessing how they can strengthen preparedness while maintaining a positive visitor experience.
Wider readiness strategy
Named in memory of Martyn Hett, a victim of the Manchester Arena attack in 2017, the legislation introduces new responsibilities for venue operators to consider the risk of terrorism and put appropriate measures in place to help prevent, respond to, and reduce the impact of a terrorist attack if it occurs.
Notably, for venues with attendees of over 800 people, physical protection such as video surveillance, vehicle access control, ground security, and more, must be considered and evaluated on a regular basis. AI-powered video solutions can help organisations meet their obligation under Martyn’s Law as part of a wider readiness strategy.
Video surveillance systems
Traditional video surveillance systems have always played a critical role in venue security, but their effectiveness has often relied on human operators monitoring dozens, or even hundreds, of video feeds simultaneously. In busy environments, critical details can be missed, particularly when security teams are managing large crowds, multiple entry points, and fast-moving situations.
With AI-powered cameras and video management systems (VMS), operators no longer need to continuously monitor multiple video, chat, and sensor data streams. Instead, AI does the monitoring, flagging any suspicious activity, unauthorised objects (people and vehicles), crowd congestion, and so on, for operators to respond to if needed. Operators are freed up to focus on other activities, while the system will quickly alert them to events that require intervention, helping them respond to events rapidly and prevent situations from escalating. Ground teams also benefit from contextual, AI-powered insights that can help them track and locate a person or vehicle of interest, such as clothing colour, direction of travel, and if they are potentially carrying a weapon.
Multi-directional models
By enabling security teams to assess and respond to situations before they develop into something more serious, venues are better prepared for some of the objectives underpinning Martyn's Law. The legislation places particular emphasis on preparedness, requiring organisations to consider how they would respond to incidents through measures such as evacuation, lockdown procedures, and effective communication. Situational awareness is fundamental to all four.
Modern-day cameras equip operators with high-definition footage of an event or object of interest. Most cameras available on the market start at 1080p definition, with 4MP, 6MP, 8MP or 4K resolution options. Camera form factors have also improved, with dome, flat eye, bullet, fish eye, pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ), thermal, and multi-directional models providing venues with a range of options to fit any sized area and surveillance need.
Monitoring crowd movements
Real-time intelligence from video surveillance provides operators with a clearer understanding of what is happening across a venue and its surrounding environment. Vitally, AI-powered video analytics and AI object detection help operators to avoid missing events that need their attention and action.
During an emergency, security teams can monitor crowd movements, identify potential bottlenecks, move towards the last known location of a potential attacker, and direct the public away from dangerous areas. Information on an attacker’s location, physical appearance, and direction of travel, plus the location of any casualties or people hiding within the venue, can be shared with on-site personnel and emergency services, helping to coordinate a faster and more efficient response.
Multiple analytics triggers
To further refine operator response times and efficiency, alerts can be set based on multiple analytics triggers, for example, if a person is detected crossing a line and then remains in a pre-defined area for a set number of seconds.
For post-event investigations, operators can search footage quickly using the metadata stored within video. For example, they can pull up all footage of all people wearing a grey top, or, to filter this further, a child wearing a grey top. This improves the efficiency and speed of carrying out investigations.
Generative AI tool
Moreover, if a video analytics tool supports it, operators can use an AI-powered search feature that enables them to input a phrase or sentence of what they are looking for, with the system showing them all relevant results. This feature, known as semantic search, is a more natural way of searching akin to prompting a generative AI tool to come to a result.
Operators can also select a specific area of interest to view all footage related to that area, allowing them to quickly find motion within that area. They can see all motion within that section on all captured video footage, to see, for example, who left a suspicious package in a room. Some video analytics systems can also pull footage of similar objects across multiple cameras, which can help track the direction of a vehicle or person of interest as they move across a busy and large event space.
Wider entertainment districts
Modern venue security increasingly extends beyond the perimeter fence or turnstile. Many new stadium developments are embedded within wider entertainment districts, retail destinations, and mixed-use communities. As a result, operators are responsible for understanding activity not only inside a venue but also across surrounding public spaces where large crowds gather before and after events.
AI-enabled video helps operators to monitor large areas efficiently, maintaining situational awareness across multiple locations and mixed-use premises (the arena, retail, transport links, storage and backroom areas, and so forth). Operators gain a comprehensive understanding of potential risks and a stronger ability to respond before issues escalate.
AI-powered video analytics
There are also value-added benefits to other departments, such as marketing, sales, maintenance, staffing, and cleaning. Understanding and predicting busy periods and crowd flow patterns, alerting to long queue lengths, identifying congestion points, and monitoring vehicle movements and parking spaces all help to improve the visitor experience and streamline event operations. This is particularly useful for multi-use venues where one day a football match may be hosted, the next day a corporate event, and the following day a concert, with different stadium areas being used each time.
Operators need visibility of how people move through their spaces and where resources are best deployed. AI-powered video analytics can provide that intelligence in real time.
Venue leaders have a short window of opportunity to strengthen their security strategies ahead of Martyn’s Law coming into force. Investing in AI-powered video security shifts security into a proactive, value-generating function that meets the needs of today’s multi-use event spaces and helps to deliver the visitor experience that attendees have become accustomed to.
