TEN YEARS OVERDUE: HOW TRARALGON BOWLS CLUB BROUGHT ITS GAMING ROOM CCTV BACK INTO COMPLIANCE
The Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission has been blunt lately: its inspectors are finding venues where CCTV coverage of the gaming machine area is incomplete and doesn’t meet the legislative requirements. For a club, that’s not a minor paperwork issue — supervision of the gaming machine area is a licence condition.
Traralgon Bowls Club Inc. got ahead of it. Their existing surveillance system was around ten years old, and while it had served the club well, it was never designed for what the rules now demand of a gaming venue. Rather than patch it, the club committed to a full replacement — and did their own homework before picking a brand.
JJ Secuwatch worked on a people counting and flow control deployment at Paddy’s Markets in Sydney, using Hikvision people counting technology to give management accurate, real-time visibility of who was coming in, where they were going, and how full the venue was at any moment.
Here’s how that kind of system works, and why it matters for any high-traffic venue.
What the rules actually require
Under Victoria’s gaming regulations, a venue’s CCTV isn’t just “cameras in the gaming room.” The system has to:
- Clearly show every EGM — the screen, the controls, and the note, ticket or coin acceptor
- Show the patron using each machine
- Record continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week
- Retain footage for at least 28 days, or longer if the venue’s liquor licence or another requirement says so
- Embed time, date and camera ID automatically on the recording
Read that first point again, because it’s where most legacy systems fall over. A wide shot covering a bank of eight machines does not satisfy it. The requirement is machine-level detail — and the acceptor in particular is a small target.
Why a ten-year-old system couldn't get there
Three problems, all of them structural rather than fixable:
Resolution. A camera specified a decade ago simply doesn’t have the pixel density to resolve a note acceptor and a patron’s face from a ceiling mount. You can’t zoom your way out of missing detail.
Lighting. Gaming rooms are one of the hardest lighting environments in commercial CCTV — bright, backlit machine screens against deliberately dim ambient light. Older cameras blow out the screen, silhouette the patron, or both. [CONFIRM DAHUA TECHNOLOGY NAME — the imaging feature that delivered true, natural image reproduction in this environment] was a significant factor in the club’s decision, because it holds detail across that contrast range instead of trading one for the other.
Channel capacity and storage. Machine-level coverage means a lot of cameras. Add entries, exits, the cashier station, the bar and general club areas, and the channel count climbs fast — well beyond what a legacy recorder can handle.
The solution
Motorised lens cameras throughout the gaming machine area. Motorised varifocal optics let each camera be framed precisely on its target during commissioning — remotely, from the recorder or a laptop, without a technician on a ladder in front of every machine. That matters more than it sounds. Gaming machine areas get reconfigured; machines get swapped and moved. When the layout changes, the cameras can be re-aimed and refocused remotely instead of booking another site visit. Compliance stays intact between changes rather than drifting out of alignment.
A 128-channel NVR with RAID 5. The channel count gives the club coverage of every machine plus the rest of the site, with headroom to expand. RAID 5 is the part worth dwelling on: it means a single drive failure doesn’t take the archive with it. When your licence depends on producing 28 days of continuous footage on request, storage redundancy isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the difference between a hardware fault and a compliance breach. The array keeps recording through a drive failure while the faulty disk is replaced.
