There’s a fugitive on the run, and he’s made it into a wooded area. Rather than continuing a foot pursuit that’s difficult, dangerous and not sure to be successful, officers instead opt for a drone – getting it above the area will provide them with a big-picture view that lets them track the suspect’s movements so they can position resources to intercept him wherever he emerges without physically entering the challenging terrain.
There are several important factors here, but one of the biggest is speed: Law enforcement needs to get that drone airborne, positioned and streaming live video fast. LiveU – whose range of IP video solutions works to shorten workflows and get video streaming quickly and efficiently – can help power these types of pursuits with simplified operations and workflows for tactical teams.
SOLUTION IS FAST, SIMPLE, RESILIENT
Many streaming solutions meant to enhance the situational awareness of public safety can be complicated to set up or unreliable in austere environments. These solutions may be powerful, but if they can’t communicate back to the emergency operations center or cloud where their functionality resides, they can disconnect, need to restart or fail completely when needed most.
A pioneer in the broadcast world, LiveU knows a few things about transmission of quality, resilient video in challenging conditions. The company’s patented bonded cellular approach combines multiple types of connections, including cellular, Wi-Fi, ethernet and satellite, to create a larger “pipe” that permits more throughput. It proprietary LiveU Reliable Transport (LRT) protocol pieces up the stream to send via the best available routes (cellular carriers, networks and additional WAN connections like satellite) and can switch instantaneously among them if one fails. The signal is reassembled at reception, producing reliable, high-quality, low-latency video even in challenging environments.
And – key for public safety – this all launches easily, starts working quickly and continues automatically, with flexibility in how all video is protected and shared.
Such an advance has many applications in the public safety market. Here are three ways LiveU technology is being leveraged to streamline workflows and produce essential video quickly and easily.
1. DRONES
Law enforcement drone programs have proliferated in recent years and had great success across a range of purposes. One consistent drawback, however, is a lack of resiliency regarding connectivity back to other viewers. Aircraft and software platforms operating at the edge often function on failover or single-network connections like a mi-fi puck. Reliance on a single network, however, means a single point of failure. If that network goes down or is weak, video and data being gathered can’t get back to the other stakeholders who aren’t on site. LiveU LRT solves this challenge.
The Florida Highway Patrol does a lot of drone flying and required a platform that was fast and easy to operate. LiveU provided FHP a plug-and-play solution that lets users simply plug in the drone and go. On the receiving end, FHP manages its video through a situational awareness platform that distributes live feeds from its aircraft and other assets. LiveU systems are designed to be compatible with existing infrastructure, so organizations that add its technology don’t need to rebuild their capabilities from scratch.
The LU300S is LiveU’s smallest portable 4G/5G video transmission solution. At just more than two pounds, it supports up to 30 megabits per second over six IP connections (four 4G/5G cellular, Wi-Fi and LAN) and has two internal dual-SIM plus two external modems. It also supports up to eight audio channels.
LiveU
“We’re not just focused on selling LiveU; we also want to be able to support customers who use other solutions,” noted Alex Joyce, the company’s vice president of solution sales engineering. “They may be in contract with different hardware and software providers. We pride ourselves on understanding the customer’s overall ecosystem and then finding out what parts of that can be complemented with LiveU.”
For such law enforcement drone operations, a good equipment choice might be the LU300S field unit paired with the LU4000 video decoder. The LU300S is LiveU’s smallest portable 4G/5G video transmission solution. At just more than two pounds, it supports up to 30 megabits per second over six IP connections (four 4G/5G cellular, Wi-Fi and LAN) and has two internal dual-SIM plus two external modems. It also supports up to eight audio channels.
The LU4000 receives, decodes, plays and streams up to four fully synced video feeds from field units, with multiple output options. Streams can be managed through the LiveU Central management platform or new LiveU Control+ app. Video can be easily shared to other internal and external endpoints. The app also permits the starting and stopping of video transport and in-app audio communications.
FHP’s first deployment of its new capabilities came with Hurricane Idalia, a category 4 storm that crossed the northern part of Florida in 2023. Components literally arrived during the hurricane. “Everything worked right out of the box,” noted Dooley.
Other drone uses for the organization include traditional purposes like surveillance, warrant service and, more recently, accident reconstruction.
“They work hand in hand with the Department of Transportation any time there’s a large accident,” said Jared Brody, LiveU’s head of public sector business development. “They have to figure out what’s going on, map it all out, measure things, take pictures. Now they can use drones to do 3D scans of the entire scene quickly, then go back and analyze them afterward, allowing them to clear the scene and get traffic flowing again.”
2. ROBOTICS
You may know Spot – it’s the robot dog offered by Boston Dynamics. Technically it’s a “dynamic sensing platform” for use at potentially hazardous scenes that may be dangerous for humans to enter. Law enforcement organizations use such platforms for diverse purposes, from simple surveillance to identifying explosives. Multiple police organizations in Florida have such devices – but again lacked a quick and easy way to relay and share video back to other remote viewers.
The dogs are typically operated remotely via mesh radio, a resilient type of LAN (local area network) wireless system first developed for the military. LiveU supplements their client’s system with the LU300S, and the department can now broadcast and share what Spot sees.
The LiveU LU300S HEVC field unit is a viable choice for quick response here. Users simply need to plug it into the radio and use LiveU Video Return to share the stream to other field units, via the Control+ app and through a dedicated portal on any PC or tablet.
3. SUPER BOWL LVIII
These workflows may be simple in design, but they’re enough to power video sharing at major world-class events, as LiveU demonstrated in January at Super Bowl LVIII. It was LiveU’s 15th Super Bowl supporting customers covering the pre- and postgame shows.
The Super Bowl is a so-called SEAR event: a major event voluntarily submitted by its organizers for a Special Event Assessment Rating (SEAR) from the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security evaluates the risks around such events and issues them scores that determine what federal protective resources they get. The Super Bowl is rated level 1, a “significant event with national and/or international importance that require[s] extensive federal interagency support.”
That support, geared to supplement local capabilities, can include things like bomb-sniffing dogs, cyber-risk assessments, venue screening, and air security and tactical operations support. But what it meant at the Super Bowl was that a lot of unconnected players – federal, state, local and private, with different platforms, capabilities and missions – needed to work together.
Several of those participating organizations in Las Vegas were using LiveU platforms for various purposes.
“What we did was really not just video contribution but reception and retransmission, meaning sharing video with dozens of other users,” said Brody, a longtime expert in the field of critical communications and visual intelligence solutions. “There were various other teams, specialists and senior leadership who weren’t at the game but wanted to have eyes on the situation.”
The flexibility of LiveU’s approach lets it layer on those capabilities without disrupting existing systems, even with video from other sources. One example involved microwave downlinks from aircraft. “The video from those downlinks goes from receiver to encoder back to a receiver that can then redistribute that video simultaneously not only via LiveU, but also other video management systems,” Brody explained. LiveU Video Return provided a key role; using it tangentially gave operators of those other systems the ability to share video links without adding latency. Just as important, this provided backup and redundancy in the event of any other network or system failure.
This year those links came with a new security feature: built-in expiration. That can now be added when event participants need to work together temporarily on discrete projects. Decoding video via hardware on scene, rather than in the cloud, adds another security benefit.
“The idea is security through obscurity,” said Joyce. “If they want to go simple, they can stay in the cloud, and everything will work the same. But security is very different in the cloud. Most of our customers who are concerned about that will request the on-premises solution. It’s the same hardware out in the field to capture that video, and it can be delivered either to a cloud server or a server that’s in an environment where an IT group can carefully manage traffic in and out.
“The value of LiveU is to be able to take a video signal from the field and send it over multiple carriers. It’s sliced into chunks, so if any of those video streams is intercepted, it’s impossible to reconstruct the video without the other streams. The only way to reconstruct it is at the server at the destination.”
FILLING CAPABILITY GAPS
It’s 2024, and lots of folks have streaming products. Not just any product, though, will work for the multiple, complex and high-stakes needs of law enforcement.
“There’s not one customer we’ve talked to who hasn’t had a connectivity challenge,” said Brody. “We’re mitigating those challenges. LiveU solutions, particularly the LU300S, are very good solutions for drones, robots – anything where you need to get video from a platform with a camera on it. The workflows are quick to set up and deploy and can be similar; it’s just a question of what you’re plugging into it and what you’re distributing it out to.
“Our mission at LiveU is to make the technology that enables the secure sharing of reliable visual intelligence easy to access so that operators can focus on their mission.”
For more information, visit LiveU.
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