The Problem
When seconds matter, your video feed shouldn't buffer.
Every major drone platform can produce video. Very few can get that video in front of the right commander, in real time, without a subscription seat for every viewer. For a police department running a perimeter on a barricaded subject, a sheriff's office coordinating a multi-county search, or a tactical team staging before entry — a 15-second RTMP delay is not operational video. It is a recording of what already happened.
EyesOn is purpose-built for the moment a drone goes up and a decision-maker — who is not the pilot, not on the airframe app, and often not in the same building — needs to see what the drone sees. Right now. On a phone. Without installing anything.
In the Field
Where it fits in a law enforcement operation.
Barricaded Subject / SWAT Callout
Overwatch drone circles the structure. SWAT commander and negotiator need the feed on separate screens — one in the command vehicle, one at the negotiator's position 200 yards away. Both get a guest link by text. No radio traffic. No tablet passed around. When the operation ends, the links expire; the video is either retained (audit log intact) or purged per retention policy.
Multi-Jurisdiction Search
County sheriff has a missing juvenile in a wooded area straddling two cities. City PD and fire both want eyes on the thermal feed. EyesOn generates three time-limited links — one for each partner, one for the state EOC liaison — and the video is shared without onboarding anyone to a new platform.
Pre-Raid Reconnaissance
Narcotics task force plans a warrant service. An overflight captures the property layout 48 hours prior. The reconnaissance feed is recorded to disk and replayed during the briefing that night — with access restricted to the assigned team, logged and auditable.
Traffic Incident / Critical Infrastructure
Major highway closure after a commercial crash. PIO needs visuals for press; commander needs aerial situational awareness; DOT wants footage of the scene. One drone, three audiences, three different access windows — all from the same EyesOn session.
Training and After-Action
Recorded streams feed directly into the training pipeline. Pull a clip, share a time-limited link with the rest of the team, debrief. No cloud upload, no YouTube unlisted hack, no awkward Dropbox link that got forwarded.
Technical Context
Why WebRTC, not RTMP.
Most drones — including the DJI enterprise fleet — can broadcast RTMP out of the box. RTMP is designed for one-way broadcast, usually to a streaming platform that transcodes and re-packages the feed as HLS. That pipeline is built for audience scale, not responsiveness.
| Metric | RTMP / HLS (typical) | EyesOn (WebRTC) |
|---|
| Latency | 5–30 seconds | 300–800 ms |
| Protocol | TCP push → HLS poll | Peer-to-peer UDP (TURN fallback) |
| Transcoding step | Required | None |
| Viewer install | Depends on platform | Browser only |
| Guest sharing | Public URL or account | Signed, time-limited link |
| Suitable for tactical decisions | No | Yes |
For a press pool watching B-roll, RTMP is fine. For a commander deciding whether to send an entry team based on what a drone is seeing through a second-floor window, it is not. EyesOn uses WebRTC end-to-end.
Data Handling
Security and policy considerations.
Law enforcement technology decisions increasingly collide with CJIS, agency data retention rules, and evidence chain-of-custody requirements. EyesOn was built with those constraints in mind:
- No CJI ingestion. EyesOn streams live video only. It does not query NCIC, does not store criminal history, and does not process Criminal Justice Information. The CJIS Security Policy applies to CJI; EyesOn does not touch CJI.
- On-premise option. Self-hosted tiers run entirely inside the agency network. Video bytes never transit a third-party cloud unless the agency chooses a TURN relay for mobile viewers — and even then, the relay sees encrypted SRTP, not decoded video.
- Time-limited access. Guest links are signed tokens with hard expiration. No standing shares. No "just re-use last week's link."
- Audit logging. Every viewer session is logged with timestamp, link identifier, and duration. Exports are available for Professional and above.
- Recording control. Recording is explicit and per-stream. Recorded video lives where the agency puts it — attached storage, agency NAS, or evidence-grade archive.
- No ads, no trackers, no analytics beacons in the operational UI.
For agency Security Officers: we are happy to walk through deployment architecture, network flow, and key management in a technical pre-sales conversation. Get in touch.
Deployment
Four tiers — pick what fits your IT footprint.
EyesOn is priced for small departments to multi-county agencies. Every tier includes the same sub-second WebRTC core — the differences are stream count, viewer count, and how much of the infrastructure the agency runs versus Barnard HQ.
$39/mo + $149 setup
Personal
2 streams, 3 viewers, companion app. For a single-drone agency validating the workflow. Self-hosted.
$89/mo + $299 setup
Professional
4 streams, 10 viewers, TURN relay, audit log, incident export, email support. Self-hosted.
$209/mo + $499 setup
Enterprise
Unlimited streams and viewers, fleet management, backup/restore, auto-updates, Cloudflare Tunnel option, priority support. Self-hosted.
$499/mo + $799 setup
Managed
BarnardHQ hosts EyesOn on dedicated hardware. Custom domain, SSL, monitoring, backups, 4-hour response SLA.
Full tier breakdown and feature matrix on the EyesOn product page.