Live Drone Video for Fire Service

The Problem

The IC is in the command vehicle. The drone is over the fire. The feed is on the pilot's tablet.

Most fire departments that bought a drone discovered the same gap on day one: the person who should be looking at the video — the Incident Commander — is not the person flying the drone. The feed lives on the pilot's controller. The IC lives in the command vehicle, the command post, or a dispatch seat miles away. Getting the video from the tablet to the decision-maker is the hard part, and most departments fall back to radio, a pilot running back and forth, or screen-sharing over a conference bridge with 15 seconds of buffered latency.

EyesOn is built for that moment. Sub-second video from the drone to every screen that needs it — IC, safety officer, division supervisor, PIO, mutual-aid liaison — without anyone installing software, creating an account, or waiting for a cloud transcoder to catch up.

Built for the Fire Ground

What EyesOn does for fire departments.

Latency

Sub-Second WebRTC

300–800 ms glass-to-glass. The IC sees what the pilot sees, now — not 15 seconds from now. That is the difference between aerial overwatch and a recording.

Multi-Viewer

IC, Safety, Division Sups

Grid view of one or more drones on multiple screens simultaneously. Safety officer watches the roof. IC watches the overall layout. Division II sup watches their face of the structure.

Mutual Aid

Time-Limited Guest Links

Text a link to a neighboring jurisdiction, the county EOC, ODF, or Cal Fire liaison. They view in a browser with no account. Link expires when you say. Revoke with one click.

Deployment

Runs at the Station

Self-hosted on a Synology NAS or mini-PC at the station — video stays inside the department network. Or go Managed and we run it on dedicated hardware with an SLA.

Thermal

M30T and Mavic 3T Ready

Stream thermal feeds with per-stream text overlays. Crew position callouts, division labels, time stamps — all visible to every viewer in real time.

After-Action

Recording + Audit Log

Every stream can be recorded to disk. Every guest link is logged. After-action review, training, and case-building all run off the same footage your IC watched live.

In the Field

Where it fits in a fire service operation.

Structure Fire, Multi-Division Operation

Working fire in a mixed-occupancy commercial. Division I assigned to the Alpha side, Division II to the Charlie exposure. Safety officer is watching a 4-story roof with suspect truss construction. One drone circling with thermal. IC sees the whole picture. Safety watches the roof on their tablet in real time and makes the decision to pull crews ten seconds before a collapse — because they saw it, not because someone radioed it.

Wildland Fire / Initial Attack

Rural fire district, initial attack on a grass-roll that is pushing toward structures. Chief is inbound in the command vehicle. Drone is already up. The feed hits the chief's phone over LTE before they even park. By the time the chief gets to ICP, they already have situational awareness. They are not learning the fire from radio traffic — they are reading it from the sky.

Mutual Aid / Multi-Agency Incident

Large incident with county fire, neighboring municipal fire, ODF for wildland involvement, and LE for perimeter. Four guest links generated from one EyesOn session. Each agency's liaison has the feed in their command vehicle, scoped to the duration of the operation. No vendor onboarding, no procurement, no "we don't have accounts on your system."

Hazmat / Technical Rescue

Hazmat incident with a vapor cloud. Drone provides aerial recon of the release, with a thermal overlay showing plume dispersion. Entry team, hazmat command, safety officer, and the on-call Environmental Health contact all watch the same feed — again, without any of them installing anything.

Training and Debrief

Recorded streams land in the department's evidence-grade archive or the training SharePoint. Pull a clip, share a time-limited link with the shift, walk through what the IC saw at the timeline it actually happened. Training that reflects operational reality, not a video someone happened to grab on their phone.

Technical Context

Why this works on department IT.

Fire department IT is often a one-person shop stretched across CAD, mobile data terminals, station networking, and whatever showed up in the last grant cycle. EyesOn was designed to fit that reality:

Runs on hardware you probably already own. A Synology NAS at the station, a mini-PC, or a modest Linux VM is enough for the Personal or Professional tier. 2 vCPU, 2–4 GB RAM, 10–50 Mbps uplink.
Docker-based deploy. One file, one command, thirty minutes to operational on the Personal/Professional tiers.
No cloud required. Self-hosted means video and metadata never leave the department network unless you explicitly choose a TURN relay for mobile viewers — and even then, the relay sees encrypted SRTP.
Works on any network. LAN, WireGuard/VPN, Cloudflare Tunnel, or a public IP — EyesOn works with all of them. Rural departments with poor upstream bandwidth can run it on LTE-only with adaptive bitrate.
Auto-updates (Enterprise tier). Set-and-forget for departments without a full-time IT.
No per-viewer license fees. A chief with three captains and two mutual-aid liaisons does not generate five billable seats. Flat tier pricing.

FlightHub 2 Integration

EyesOn pairs with FlightHub 2 — it does not replace it.

If your department already runs DJI FlightHub 2 for fleet management, flight logs, airspace awareness, and pilot compliance — keep it. That is what FlightHub 2 is good at. EyesOn adds the layer FlightHub 2 does not address well: live video to non-licensed viewers. Chief, PIO, mutual-aid commander, dispatcher — none of them need a FlightHub 2 seat to watch a feed in EyesOn. That is the split.

The EyesOn Companion App for Android bridges DJI Pilot 2 into EyesOn via RTMP, then converts to WebRTC for viewers. Your pilot workflow does not change. See the full EyesOn product page for the integration architecture.

Pricing

Four tiers — picked for department budgets.

EyesOn is priced for single-station volunteer districts to multi-battalion municipal departments. Every tier includes the same sub-second WebRTC core.

$39/mo + $149

Personal

Single-drone department validating the workflow. 2 streams, 3 viewers. Self-hosted.

$89/mo + $299

Professional

4 streams, 10 viewers, TURN, audit log, incident export. Recommended for most rural fire districts.

$209/mo + $499

Enterprise

Unlimited streams/viewers, fleet management, backup/restore, auto-updates, Cloudflare Tunnel support.

$499/mo + $799

Managed

BarnardHQ hosts EyesOn on dedicated hardware. Custom domain, SSL, monitoring, backups, 4-hour SLA.

Full breakdown on the EyesOn product page. For budget justification or grant-write-up support, get in touch.

Questions

FAQ

How does drone video actually help on the fire ground?

Three ways: (1) the IC gets an aerial vantage on roof conditions, exposure threats, and crew positioning that no ground unit can provide; (2) the safety officer can monitor multiple operational divisions simultaneously; (3) partner agencies and the command vehicle staff get the same feed without driving to the scene. Sub-second latency is the difference between operational video and a recording of what already happened.

Does EyesOn support wildland and structure fire operations equally?

Yes. Wildland operations benefit from the multi-viewer grid and mutual-aid guest links — a single drone can serve IC, division sups, safety, and liaison agencies across jurisdictional boundaries. Structure fires benefit from thermal imaging streams (M30T, Mavic 3 Thermal) with overlaid text for crew position callouts. Both flow through the same EyesOn session.

What about wildfire — can we hand off video to ODF, Cal Fire, or a neighboring county EOC?

Time-limited guest links are exactly the mechanism. Generate a link scoped to the agency and duration, text it to their liaison, and they view in a browser with no account setup. Revoke with one click. No account sprawl, no training, no new software to install on the recipient side.

We already use DJI FlightHub 2 — do we need to rip it out?

No. EyesOn pairs with FlightHub 2 via the EyesOn Companion App. Your pilots keep flying in Pilot 2 and FlightHub 2 handles fleet management, airspace, and compliance. EyesOn adds the live-video guest-sharing layer — useful when your chief, your PIO, or your mutual-aid partner needs eyes on a feed but does not need a FlightHub 2 seat.

Our department runs on a tight budget — what's the minimum viable tier?

Personal ($39/mo self-hosted) covers a single-drone department that needs the core workflow. Professional ($89/mo) adds audit logging and TURN relay. For most rural fire districts we recommend Professional self-hosted — it runs on a Synology NAS or a $300 mini-PC at the station.

Is this grant-eligible?

EyesOn has been funded under AFG (Assistance to Firefighters Grant) technology line items and various state UAS grants. We can provide a scoped line-item quote and technology-justification language for grant writers. Contact us with the program you are applying under.

What about CJIS / evidence / records retention?

EyesOn does not ingest CJI. Video recordings are stored wherever the department configures — station NAS, agency evidence system, or encrypted archive — and retention is controlled by department policy. Audit logs cover every guest session. For specific records-management program integrations, reach out and we will work the scope.