Lytx products provide fleet operations managers video evidence

San Diego-based Lytx, a provider of video solutions for commercial and government fleets, says it is making it possible for fleet and operations managers to virtually be in a vehicle or in the field with its new Lytx Video Services.

Lytx Video Services, a combination of an event recorder and video cameras – all cloud-connected – are designed to eliminate fleet and operations blind spots.

The video evidence Lytx Video Services provides can be useful in a variety of ways, says the company, including:

• Evaluation: Video evidence can help companies evaluate both driving and nondriving processes and procedures to improve the effectiveness of their operations.
• Verification: Video evidence can provide proof or confirmation of the true story, such as load delivery.
• Discovery: Video evidence can help reveal new revenue-generating opportunities or opportunities to improve customer service.

Available as an integrated service enhancement to the DriveCam safety program, which helps organizations pinpoint and extract risk from their fleet, Lytx Video Services has a host of video functionality that the company says is as much about the ease of using the video as it is about where that video may be captured.

“Late in 2016, we introduced the Unisyn ‘video without limits’ platform and immediately went into beta testing where we discovered that with some key enhancements the Unisyn platform could broaden into a host of services offering many more benefits than the original concept,” says Lytx Chairman and CEO Brandon Nixon. “The key, we discovered was giving our clients the ability to easily – and quickly -- go back to a specific point in time to see exactly what happened, from any view they desired. This ability to see more – and therefore know and do more — about what’s happening in the vehicle and in the field could completely transform how a fleet operates.”

The DriveCam program with Lytx Video Services uses the new Lytx ER-SF64 event recorder equipped with features to give the user an abundance of video and data including:

• a driver-facing lens that captures only 12- or 20-second exception-based video clips, triggered when a driving event occurs, such as a hard brake or a sudden swerve;
• an outside lens that has continually recording video plus the option to livestream video to your location when you need to see what’s happening in real time;
• an onboard, cloud-connected digital video recorder (DVR) with a 64-gigabyte memory – enough to store video for about a week’s worth of vehicle operations;

• the advanced sensors used by other Lytx event recorders to capture critical data about driving events, including accelerometers to detect speed, gyroscopes to detect motion, and GPS to detect location; and
• easy connections to third-party PAL- or NTSC-based cameras, including those already installed on client vehicles, enabling 360-degree views in and around the vehicle. With the addition of a small piece of hardware called the Lytx Hub™, Lytx Video Services can accommodate up to 12 additional camera views – four cameras per hub, and 3 hubs per vehicle -- as well as the ER-SF64.

Data and video from the DriveCam program and Lytx Video Services are accessed via the new Lytx Workspace, a web-based command center, to efficiently manage fleet safety and operations functions, the company says. The Workspace has an enhanced DriveCam program dashboard with prioritized coaching events, at-a-glance driver ranking and other features.

For Lytx Video Services, users can live-stream video in the Workspace, as well as customize and manage their program settings in the Workspace to streamline what recorded video they choose to watch and/or download.

“No two fleet operations are the same, and that’s why we engineered in the ability to customize services to solve a fleet’s unique challenges,” said Nixon.

Lytx Video Services uses a highly configurable system of tagging – including cloud-based triggers from third-party systems for fleet tracking, critical events and limitless custom configurations -- to organize video, allowing the user to search and find video clips related to specific tags, says the company. From there, users can choose the length of the video clip they desire, and download it. Clips from all continually recording camera views, including third-party cameras, are gathered, synchronized and delivered to the user’s Workspace dashboard for review.

“We’ve solved the most daunting challenge of having hours upon hours of video, and that’s the time it takes to find the exact video clip you need,” said Nixon. “Your video views are served up quickly in seconds to a single screen, revealing a fuller picture of a single event.”

Lee Robledo, vice president of safety and loss control for logistics firm NFI Industries, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, says Lytx Video Services has helped with efficiencies. “We’ve had the experience where our managers have gone to a live feed once they’ve been notified by their driver that they’re having an issue with the customer,” he said. “Now you have concrete proof that you can talk to your customer about.”

Lytx Video Services will be available in the first quarter of 2018.