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.
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.
- The keys stay on your team’s handsets. We carry the video without being able to watch it
- On a private channel we refuse to carry video that is not locked, rather than trusting the app to have done it
- 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.