One mobile device for location, sensor fusion, collaboration, and now mobile video streaming.

If you have followed our social long enough, you know that we are totally focused on REAL-TIME situational awareness. We wake up at night thinking about new forms of relevant information we can share amongst responders, but also their commanders, which changes the life safety and operational efficiency equation. Let’s protect our responders while we bring home innocents trapped in an impossible situations.

When we served the leadership at CPA Baghdad in 2003 (where Blueforce was born), we were struck at the traffic jam at the video conferencing suite. Everyone wanted to talk live, face to face. It was then that we learned about ground truth intelligence. It was the look on the face of the commander; the non-verbal queues that said “things aren’t going well”. It was looking into the very eyes and the immediacy of the specific situation. We trust our eyes and what we see. Location is good. Awareness of the surrounding is better. But, seeing is believing.

Bodycams have been the rage as they embody the emergence of mobile, live video solutions that allow professional responders to not only to tell command about what is going on, but to show what is happening at a specific location. By definition, live on-scene video is mobile, which, in a response setting, means fundamental differences compared to fixed video infrastructure in terms of flexibility and availability. Body-worn solutions deliver context and reality that can be shared without ever cracking a microphone or opening PTT session.  Fused with cognitive services/AI, well, that is another story.

Yet, when it comes to bodycams, we have always scratched our heads at the preponderance of “yet another device” that our responders must manage, charge, and keep track of. When we ask folks who come to our events “who here carries a smartphone”, we get a 100% affirmative response. When we ask the same group, “who wants to carry multiple devices, with multiple batteries, and multiple maintenance processes to do your job”, the hands go to zero. BlueforceTACTICAL runs on the devices we all carry, using the data plans we already pay for. It provides fused location, incident collaboration, sensor fusion, and now live streaming video.

Blueforce is pleased to announce our new Wowza Streaming Plugin for BlueforceTACTICAL Android. It’s available now, and comes free with BlueforceTACTICAL for Android. The plugin provides on-demand RTMP streaming to your Wowza Streaming Media Server and extends BTAC based video to hundreds and thousands of endpoints. And it is interoperable with your UAV/UAS, helo FLIR video, MWD/K9, and robotics platform video feeds. Send from BTAC, but also consume in BTAC  and our BlueforceCOMMAND for Windows and HTML5 with sub-2000ms latency.

So what makes the Blueforce offering different?  We would bubble it down to this:

1. Leverage the device your folks already carry: Android or iOS
2. Local recording and/or live streaming (with sub 2 second latency; soon 500ms)
3. Cloud recording and autonomous promotion to evidence systems
4. Send video and/or audio from the same Blueforce Plugin
5. Cueing: Because the plugin is built on Blueforce’s patented sensor fusion platform, a wide array of other sensors can cue the Wowza Plugin to begin stream/recording.  EX: Holster sensors that tell the plugin to start streaming when an officer pulls their firearm; the user walks more than 5 feet from their vehicle, etc.

Stay tuned, we are closing on 500ms latency for all of your feeds. Want to learn more? Call us at 866-960-0204, or send an email to info@blueforcedev.com.