Show them, while you tell them

Some things cannot be described down a radio. A broadcast puts what one person is looking at on everybody else’s screen, while they keep talking about it — because describing and showing should not be a choice.

Ask for early access See the security model

In beta. The encoder, the relay, the viewer and the dispatch tile are built, and the wire format is covered by tests through a real relay including several people broadcasting at once. It has not been run across a fleet of real handsets yet — cheap rugged hardware varies in exactly the places video is fussiest, and until we have done that we will not call it shipping.

Several people can broadcast at once

Video is deliberately not floor-controlled the way voice is. Wiring it through the floor would mean you could not broadcast a scene while describing it, which is the situation the feature exists for.

A broadcast is independent of who holds the channel, so you talk over your own picture
More than one person can broadcast from the same incident, from different angles
Dispatch sees the streams side by side rather than one at a time

Built for a metered link and a cheap handset

This runs over whatever connection a site has, on hardware chosen for being droppable rather than fast.

Opting out is handled on our side, so a worker on an expensive connection stops the bytes rather than receiving and discarding them
Separate from Solo and Busy on purpose: those mean "do not talk at me", and somebody who set Busy during an incident still wants to see it
The viewer reads the picture format out of the stream rather than assuming one, because a mixed fleet of rugged handsets does not agree on it

Nothing is recorded

Video is relayed and forgotten. There is no row in a database and no file on a disk, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

No storage means no retention question, no disclosure question and nothing to leak later
If recording is ever wanted it will be a consent-gated feature an organisation switches on, not a side effect of watching
The broadcaster sees the picture actually leaving their phone — not what the camera sees, but what the crew will get, which is the more useful question on a poor link

What the encryption covers

On an encrypted channel the video is encrypted the same way the voice is, and the relay forwards frames it cannot read.

Keys stay on member devices; the server carries ciphertext
The server refuses plaintext video on a channel that is supposed to be encrypted, rather than trusting the app to behave
We can see that somebody broadcast, to which channel and for how long. We cannot see the picture

What would your crew point a camera at?

A fault, a delivery, a hazard, a queue — tell us the situation and the handsets you use, and we will tell you honestly how it will behave on them.

Talk to us