Wireless video technologies are helping a small city near San Francisco deliver real-time situational awareness to police and public safety agencies across a sprawling metropolitan area.
The city is Lafayette, a suburb 20 miles northeast of San Francisco that contracts with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department for police protection. Their story combines Oscar-winning streaming technology, a video-savvy emergency services director, and a public-safety community craving a better eye-in-the-sky perspective on public emergencies like wildfires and earthquakes.
Lafayette’s experience demonstrates how small agencies can have a huge impact on policing and protecting the public when they make the right technology choices.
THE CHALLENGE: COLLECTING VIDEO FEEDS FROM DRONES AND HELICOPTERS
Lafayette, a suburban city of just over 25,000 residents, had a two-pronged problem that had nagged at emergency services coordinator John Cornell for years. He figured there had to be a better way to capture video from drones his agency operated. And he desperately wanted a technology refresh for video feeds from helicopters operated by the sheriff’s office.
“The helicopters had a video downlink system that was old and antiquated,” Cornell recalled. His colleagues at the sheriff’s office knew he had a knack for figuring out video technologies, so they asked him to find a solution.
There was much more to the request than fixing a few video feeds. With threats of earthquakes and wildfires always looming, Cornell knew he needed aerial views that could be shared across multiple jurisdictions. Moreover, he knew the city’s small drone fleet, which comes in handy during everyday police activities, could be vital for coordinating a regional emergency response.
“We’ve had drones since 2015,” Cornell said. “So, one aspect was, how do we see the drone? And then furthermore, how do we send that drone’s feed to other agencies?”
Cornell started combing the internet for technologies that deliver live video feeds. And that’s how he got into the technical side of show business, where cameras, cloud services and streaming technologies are transforming real-time video coverage.
THE SOLUTION: TERADEK PRISM MOBILE AND CORE CLOUD PLATFORM
Cornell’s internet search led him to Teradek, a Southern California hardware manufacturer that has made its name creating technology for filmmakers and live broadcasters. Teradek’s technology won two Scientific and Technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and an Engineering Emmy in 2021 for developing techniques for live video monitoring of movie and TV locations.
As he scrolled through Teradek’s website, Cornell noticed a boxy gadget with multiple antennae mounted on top. The device, an HEVC encoder called Prism Mobile, mounts on the back side of a video camera and streams live video to the cloud via 5G cellular signals.
“I’m looking at this piece of equipment on their website and it’s very simple,” Cornell said. “It was very apparent that it would take in the different video connections we needed.” It could also easily plug into power sources on vehicles and helicopters.
Cornell contacted the company and asked if anybody they knew of had ever mounted the Prism Mobile in a helicopter. They couldn’t recall anybody who ever had, but they decided to deliver one to Cornell to try.
When it arrived, Cornell attached it inside the helicopter’s cabin, ran wires to the onboard camera and got everything configured the way they needed it. It was just as easy to connect it to a drone controller.
“It worked great,” Cornell recalled.
Within a week or two, the sheriff’s office helicopter was summoned to help rescue a kite surfer in San Francisco Bay who was injured and in distress. “The waves were like 2 feet tall, and the helicopter has this perfect picture of the guy,” Cornell said. “And we were sending that video back to the Coast Guard. We also had the highway patrol working with the local fire department to save this guy on the water.”
The Prism Mobile combines multiple internet connections to send video downlinks to the Teradek Core platform. Teradek’s cloud-based Core platform lets users cost-effectively monitor multiple live feeds on a mobile app, tablet or desktop computer. A system administrator grants secure access to individual users, which sharply reduces the risk of hacking or malicious misuse.
When word of the technology got out to nearby police agencies, they started asking Cornell for access to the feeds. That led to the creation of the East Bay Interagency Video Network, which encourages collaboration across the region.
THE RESULTS: REAL-TIME AWARENESS ACROSS MULTIPLE BAY AREA JURISDICTIONS
Teradek got its start designing technology to help people on movie or broadcast locations deliver real-time streams of the action happening in front of their cameras. Posting the live feeds in the cloud gave Hollywood producers a view of the action they were paying for as it happened. Emmys and Oscars ensued.
Thanks to a curious and resourceful public safety official in the San Francisco Bay Area, the same technology is delivering real-time awareness of the human dramas police and the public see every day. It has practical everyday implications, like allowing police tactical teams to mount small, fixed cameras to monitor the entrances to structures where they are operating. These cameras can be powered from the vehicle and kept on duty for much longer than aerial drones that must come down to get their batteries recharged.
The bigger picture is that Teradek’s tools give Bay Area agencies a kind of interoperability and flexibility that often eludes individual jurisdictions. A live video feed changes the equation for police, fire and emergency personnel that might never surmount the seemingly endless challenges to collaborating on radios and smartphones.
Everybody sees the same things as they happen. This simple concept is helping Bay Area agencies develop relationships that might never have happened otherwise — mostly by bridging communication gaps resulting from restrictions on who gets to see what.
“There’s no hierarchy of ‘you can’t see this, and you can’t see that,’” Cornell said. “We’re all sharing, we’re all forming those relationships, and we’re expanding those relationships so everybody has the best possible chance of a good outcome to whatever the disaster or call is that day.”
To learn more, visit Teradek.
