Police Scotland introduce simultaneous live drone and helicopter streaming

The newly deployed ExStream UAV Streamer, developed by Excelerate Technology, was customized to improve situational awareness across air to ground operations, solving the long-term issue of the feed only being visible to a single operator or ground-based unit.

The UAV Streamer connects to existing UAVs and other video devices and delivers the video into Excelerate’s ExStream video streaming service even when only low bandwidths are available from the field. From there, users can access the remote streams via dedicated iOS and Android applications, Windows and Mac clients in addition to a secure web portal.

Police Scotland commissioned the complete package to be in place to stream helicopter downlink into the control room during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow in November 2021.

Maintaining officer and public safety

Inspector Nicholas Whyte, of Police Scotland’s Air Support Unit, said: “The Excelerate technology allows the Air Support Unit to downlink live footage from the helicopter or drone to any control room in Scotland, to police commanders on the ground and to officers’ police-issue mobile devices who are directly involved with the incident. This gives those involved a real time, aerial view of events, enabling them to make informed decisions about an operation or search as well as maintaining officer and public safety.”

Currently, Police Scotland has five ExStream UAV Streamers in operation, with the aim of rolling out further units as part of the Force’s ambition of being a first adopter of leading-edge technology. 

The system in place enables drone operators and teams within Police Scotland to send live simultaneous footage via Excelerate’s secure dual-resilient data centres, which are cyber and national infrastructure-approved for greater security, where it can be immediately accessed by relevant personnel on any team member’s authorized and connected device.