A pair of casino security case studies from the October print issue of Professional Security magazine.
In Greece, Regency Casinos is the casino gaming brand of Hyatt Regency Hotels & Tourism (Hellas) SA. It sought CCTV to protect its assets and customers.
Supplied by Signal Electronics Security of Athens, Synectics’ appointed agent for Greece, a CCTV surveillance system includes Synectics’ SynergyPro software control system and digital recording. Tim Jones, Regency’s Surveillance Director says: "Firstly, I arranged a product review and evaluation on the three foremost digital recording suppliers. They all supplied and installed demonstration equipment in one of our European casinos. With each system on a two-week trial, the operators, supervisors and shift managers were all asked to use the systems on a regular basis. I spent a tremendous amount of time using the systems personally, so that I could effectively assess each unit on its own merits. After the trial, a questionnaire was prepared for our operators, supervisors and shift managers, in addition to a dedicated focus group. Each manufacturer’s system was evaluated in 15 separate categories, with the results showing that Synectics came top in all 15 categories.” The install finished in December 2005, the system has 120 cameras covering all aspects of the casino, including table games, slot machines, cage, reception, back of house and outside the building. The camera points were chosen after an internal audit assessed the threat to each area of the casino; these areas were then addressed with appropriate CCTV. Data from the system’s cameras is managed by Synectics’ SynergyPro control software, which lets staff generate reports, play-back incidents, and catalogue evidential video in the system’s ‘evidence locker’ facility. Shift managers can generate ‘incident’ and ‘error procedural reports’, digitally linked to video footage.
Still being built, The Venetian Macao~Resort~Hotel, a $US1.8 billion development mirroring its Las Vegas namesake, will become the largest fully digital matrix casino surveillance system in the world, it is claimed.
It’s the anchor property of the Cotai Strip of Macao on the Chinese coast. Planned opening is in 2007. The 10.5 million square feet Venetian Macao is a 3,000 suite resort including hotel, casino, convention and meeting places, and restaurants and retail space. The casino will consist of 546,000 square feet of gaming floor which includes 6,000 slot machines and 700 table games. Hardware, software, monitoring and transmission components for full resolution, real time CCTV are from manufacturer Dallmeier. According to the casino, it chose the CCTV firm’s decentralised archiving solution with virtual matrix functionality because the system offered savings in relation to peripherals and network components, and offered economic and secure archiving. Comparing the decentralised with the centralised recording system solutions, the cost advantage is about 3:1 because of the significantly higher resources required for storage, network and failsafe reliability within a centralised recording solution, according to the manufacturer.
Disks
Phase one of the Cotai Strip system comprises fixed and PTZ (dome) cameras monitoring the casino, restaurants and hotel. Monitoring of the cameras from the installation completed in 2004 at the Sands Macao Casino (and featured in the July 2004 issue of Professional Security) will be in the Venetian Macao control room. Systems to be added later in adjoining hotels will result in the system being the largest fully digital matrix casino surveillance system in the world, it is claimed. Decentralised recording is carried out by Dallmeier’s DIS-2M streaming servers (digital video recorders) using the MPEG-2 compression format. Recorded data are written to two hard disks (per DVR) by mirrored recording. The standard hard disk stores seven days of recording (real time), while a second hard disk stores 24 hours of data as a back-up.
