Filming an Event on a Mobile Phone: Live Transmission

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was just listening to a radio story (NPM?) about a guy who was being searched in a subway station in England. His girlfriend was filming the event on her phone-camera. The police objected to this and tried to seize her camera.

My question: (this could have gone in General Questions, I guess) – aren’t there ways to film an event on your camera phone – and have the data sent, in real time, to a remote host? So, okay, fine: the cops seize your phone. They might even erase the image. Too damn bad, because the image is now on my home computer, and thus backed up offsite, and I might even have automatically forwarded it to a discussion group!

Do the police really think that seizing cameras is meaningful any more? Is seizing a camera meaningful any more?

2

Whatever might happen to the image of the events already filmed, seizing the camera is still an effective method of preventing the filming of any future events.

3

To do that, you’d need connectivity. Probably it would be via cellular data plan or WiFi, though I suppose there are specialized services using other methods.

A camera that automatically logged into available WiFi and updated the last 15 seconds of what it was seeing, like dash cams do continuously, but remotely? Or an instant-on record, login, and upload button?

Edit: YouTube Capture looks like it’s getting close, but I’m not sure whether it’s ‘live’.

4

There are a few apps around that claim to do this. I don’t know how well they work.

5

I just tried YouTube Capture on the iPhone. It seems to take previously-existing videos and uploads them later. If you record with it, after recording, it gives you the chance to upload; if you don’t, it saves the video to your camera roll.

6

If it doesn’t exist…it blessed well should! If I get threatened by somebody in a parking lot, and record it…it isn’t too much of a deterrent if he knows that by smashing my phone, he destroys the record. But if he knows that it’s already someplace where he can’t get it, then the deterrent is stronger, at least.

(Hm! I should have patented this!)

7

Hmm. The critical term seems to be ‘streaming’ video. Should have remembered that.

Broadcast For Friends?

Here’s one using the Ustream service. More.

Edit. At least one of those is available in the US iTunes store, but not the Canadian. This shows a weakness of such centrally-managed apps. Maybe there’s some open-source equivalent?

8

isn’t this the central concept of Google Glass? to have a camera always pointed at your pov and to stream it to your google friends.

9

There is no film inside a phone.
(Sorry, pet peeve. ;))

10

Fair enough… (Actually, there probably are various “film” subassemblies; ribbon wire harness, etc.) We still dial our phones, and I have a number of pen-pals… Language is slow to adapt.

11

Just to be clear - based on my reading of the Metropolitan Police guidelines on photography, in the UK the police cannot stop someone photographing/filming them during the course of their normal duties in a public place unless they suspect they are being filmed as a means to further terrorist activity.

It looks like Skype is going to gain the ability to record video messages to a mailbox - this would probably fit the requirements for offsite recording. Actually, I have wondered about the concept of using a smartphone as a dashcam - turn on the camera, record data from the last 15 or so seconds uploaded to a cloud storage device, add GPS data about vehicle movement/location…

12

Just make a video call to someone who can record it? If I were Skype, I’d start such live video recording services.

13

Which might not be much use if you’re in a Tube station. There is wifi available in some stations, but its only available to customers of certain networks.