Mat Schriner:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on your location. We will get started at 1:01 P.M. Eastern Time, so please be patient with us as we prepare for our program. Thank you.

Once again, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on your location. We'll get started in roughly 90 seconds at 1:01 PM. Thank you.

All right. I have 1:01 P.M. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on your location, and thank you for joining us today for our LPF webinar titled Deploying Security Deterrence to Mitigate Retail Loss, sponsored by our valued LPF partners, LiveView Technologies. My name is Mat Schriner, and I'm the Director of Operations for the Loss Prevention Foundation. I will be your host today.

Before we introduce our speakers and cover some logistics, I would like to thank LiveView Technologies for sponsoring today's session and for being a valued LPF partner. LiveView Technologies has spent years developing the first remote full security solution. LVT camera units rapidly deploy whenever and wherever you need them, no need for wires, power or internet. So whether you need surveillance in a parking lot, on a lonely roadway, on a busy intersection, or at a concert or sporting event, LVT has a solution for you.

So let's talk a few logistics items. First and foremost, this session is being recorded and a link to the recording will be sent out to all registrants tomorrow. Secondly, all participants are muted to minimize disruption to the audience as well as the speakers. Audio is available through the Zoom platform and through the dial in number provided when you registered. We do ask any and all questions are entered into the Q&A box in the Zoom platform, and we will hold those questions until the end of the presentation to ensure that we're able to get through all of the material.

So let's meet our speakers. First up we have David Studdert. David is the Development Officer at LiveView Technologies. David joined LVT in 2011 after an extensive career in government management and executive positions. His wide range of professional experiences include time as a White House appointee and United States diplomat, as well as managing sales and marketing at i3 Technologies. Studdert helped LVT expand their clientele to include state governments, Department of Transportation and other government agencies. Studdert and his wife have four children and live in Midway, Utah.

Next up we have Lorin Fotheringham, Director of Customer Success with LiveView Technologies. Lorin grew up in Hyde Park, Utah, a small town in the northern part of the state. He attended Utah State University. In his role as Director of Customer Success, Fotheringham works with strategic customers to help them maximize value in LVT products. Good afternoon, Lorin.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Thank you.

Mat Schriner:

Also, joining us today we have Jih-Hao Cheng, Director of Loss Prevention with Dick's Sporting Goods. Jih-Hao has been with Dick's Sporting Goods since 2009. He was the regional director of LP based out of California for the last 10 years, and recently took over the Director of Loss Prevention Operations, Investigations and Supply Chain. Prior to that, he was the Director of Loss Prevention for eight years with another organization. Cheng received his judicial doctorate in 2010 and is an active attorney with the California state bar. Very impressive. Good afternoon, Jih-Hao.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Good afternoon. Thank you.

Mat Schriner:

And I will turn it over to Lorin at this point.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Awesome. Thank you very much, Mat. Really appreciate it. I am sharing screen here. Give me just one second. Fantastic.

So thank you again for having us. We have three main topics that we want to cover today, and then we'll do a little Q&A here at the end. The first one we want to talk about with Jih-Hao. Super thankful he's here today, a fantastic partner and we've been able to do a lot of great things, and there's a lot more things coming up that we're going to be able to accomplish. So thankful he's here.

First thing we want to kind of talk about and discuss today are the security issues facing retailers today, some of those trends. The second thing we want to talk about is deterrence and its part in security. And then the last thing is deterrence, and more specifically how LVT helps with that deterrence.

So first of all, as we're getting things kicked off here, we want to take about 30 seconds and understand from this group, what are the biggest issues that you're seeing right now with regards to loss prevention efforts? So if you'll take just a couple of seconds and click in here, we'd love to understand from this group what that looks like. We're going to give it about 20 more seconds and then we'll continue.

Okay, fantastic. We already have results back. So Jih-Hao, it looks like balancing security with store environment is one of the most tricky. I would've had balancing new sales revenues, buying online, picking up in store, all those new things that are happening these days. But I would've been wrong. What are your thoughts on what we're seeing on these polls? Is this in line with what you're seeing at Dick's Sporting Goods?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, great question Lorin, and very, very similar to I think the last two responses, balancing security with store environment and keeping thieves out of our store. They kind of go hand in hand. I think over the last several years we continue to see an escalation in external theft activity. Years ago, loss prevention for us, it was really about operational controls and they still are, but as we've seen activity increase year over year, we're looking for more meaningful ways to mitigate losses. And I think coming out of the pandemic and last year, there's so much more opportunity that comes with the external theft activity in particular, which is really the safety concerns. We're starting to see more activity that could lead to violence and things of that nature. So that's been the concern that we primarily have these days, is really around not just the external theft, but really the escalation and bad behavior in our stores, if you will.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that makes sense. So it starts with the bad thought or being in the wrong place at the wrong time and then can escalate all the way up to loss of life, is kind of what we've seen. And so the idea is catching that where you can, reversing it and turning it back. I appreciate that answer.

What about as far as, as we see this trend of everything, not everything, many things going online. And brick and mortar, Dick's Sporting Goods has done a fantastic job with their brick and mortar experience, and we've seen some others go to more of the online play. Brick and mortar, we've seen those numbers decrease a little bit. And so the brick and mortar that are out there and still doing a great job, are you seeing an increase because of the decrease of the possibility of being in brick and mortar?

‍Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, absolutely. I think over the last few years as brick and mortar, we see consolidation in retail storefronts. We absolutely see a corresponding increase in theft activity, and it makes sense, right? You don't necessarily, shoplifters don't necessarily change professions. Now that one retailer is closed, they find the next retailer to find. And I think Dick's Sporting is too, we carry a lot of merchandise that has great resale value when offer up eBay, et cetera, and fencing operations. So as year over year, as more and more retailers close, we are definitely seeing a huge increase in activity, which is a big part of why I think we're seeing that trend.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that makes sense. The second item we have on here is grab and go theft. And we have a range of good strategic partners, many of the ones that we see high rates of this with product that sits outside the store and opportunists that want to grab something and go. What do you see as far as inside the store, and what are some of the things that you do inside the store to try and mitigate some of that grab and go, and is it increasing or decreasing? A couple of questions for you there, sorry.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, no, no, those are all great questions. I think traditionally all of us, we spend a lot of time, effort, and resources trying to address what happens once that shoplifter comes in the store, whether it's your merchandise exposure standards or protection standards, sensor tagging, cameras, sometimes locking things down to the detriment of our customers, leveraging all kinds of technology to try and solve the problem of, "Hey, what do we do when they come in and how do we stop them from stealing?"

But that's a very, very expensive proposition. And I think that the bigger issue, as you see, the increase in theft is not just the expense of deploying these measures, but it's the labor that's involved to do all these things. The labor to sensor tag, the labor to remove tags, the labor to report, report incidents, loss incidents, and the labor to actually investigate these things. We have a team of investigators who are constantly looking out for ORC activity and things of that nature, but that all takes a lot of time and energy. And sometimes I don't know that we oftentimes look outside of the box before they come in, as an alternative solution.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And then the last item we had on this slide is violent crimes. This is that cringe topic that is very difficult to talk about, and some of these things are life-changing that can happen in some of these areas. And so I want to be careful as we talk through this, but it feels like with the pandemic, for a minute things paused as folks were staying home and trying to stay safe. And now that things are opening back up, it feels like things are increasing maybe even in this category. What would you say to folks on this call of what you're seeing at Dick's Sporting Goods and what your thoughts are?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, I mean I think with, it goes without saying, there's this strong correlation of the more activity, external theft activity you have in the store, the higher likelihood and probability you're going to have violence or threat of violence attached to those incidents. And that's our biggest concern, priority these days. Loss of merchandising of course is one thing, that's a financial erosion. But for us, our biggest priority these days is addressing the amount of activity that we're seeing. Whether it's COVID related or shoplifting related, Dick's Sporting Goods's biggest priority is, how do we take care and address these situations? That's more important, the safety of our customers and the safety of our employees.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, definitely. One thing I'd add to violent crimes is, it feels like to me too in working in this industry, that there's a lot of soft costs in violent crimes. If God forbid a shooting happens or something in a parking lot, there's a lot of follow up, there's a lot of work, there's a lot of investigation, and there ends up being a lot of soft costs: time of employees, resources. Is there anything you could speak to as far as after an unfortunate violent crime happens, what that looks like and what kind of lift that is for Dick's Sporting Goods?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah. I mean there's so many things associated when something bad happens beyond just a shoplifting or theft incident. You have of course the life safety of our customers, our employees. That's the paramount issue. But the morale of the store, do people feel safe coming to work every day? Do our customers still want to shop with us knowing that they're not shopping in a safe environment? Those are the kinds of things that we're constantly thinking about. And in today's environment and the things you watch in the news, you hear all the time, it's always on video and social media where there's some sort of outbursts, activity, violence crime, shooting events. Those are the things that we have to protect more than anything else. So absolutely.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's a great point to bring up with social media. I mean, it's not just journalists now that are posting that stuff and putting it up on TV. Everyone has that screen, and with social media, the huge audiences that can be had with somebody with just a phone. So there is I feel like increasing risk with the opportunity that provides too. There are some risks there, so thank you for that.

Well, let's jump into the next part, the next segment, the importance of deterrence in security, and we want to do another quick survey. We've got just two that we're doing in this segment, and so this is the second one. What is the most difficult hurdle preventing your store decreasing asset loss? Not enough budget, can't close parking lot to run new security wires, difficulty identifying bad actors, potential criminals, maintaining staff training/staff turnover, slow reaction times, asset loss isn't a problem in my store. Hopefully it's not the last one, probably wouldn't have joined this discussion.

So we'll give that about 20 more seconds for folks on this call to go in and make a quick selection. Awesome. So here we've got some results. So number one, at 22%, maintaining staff training and staff turnover. So a lot of that sounds like awareness, and how you've mentioned that and talked through what you've done at Dick's Sporting Goods, and that that's one of your biggest pieces. It looks like number two was, difficulty identifying bad actors and potential criminals. That's definitely a very big deal. And then number three, not enough budget would be number three. So Jih-Hao, what are your thoughts for what this survey as it compares to Dick's Sporting Goods and what you've seen?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

I mean the poll is spot on to the exact same challenges we face. If we didn't have the high turnover, we could really make those investments in educating our teams on what to do properly. They'd have the experience in how to engage potential shoplifters, and that would be a huge problem solver, but this is retail and that's the nature of our environment.

And then identifying bad actors. That is the hard part, especially last year and this year with masks on. That has become even more and more challenging to even leverage analytics, video, et cetera, to say, "That for sure is the right person." And the last thing you want to do is identify the wrong person. So that certainly is a huge challenge.

And then in budget constraints, that's always the issue in terms of how do you spend the right amount of money to offset loss. But that's kind of one thing I am really fortunate. Dick's Sporting Goods puts the safety of our employees and our customers first. I feel really, really grateful that as an organization from leadership down, the message has been, "Look, what do we need to do to make sure our customers are safe, our employees are safe, and come to work feeling like this is a great work environment?"

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's fantastic. When it comes to, one thought I had is daytime versus nighttime. To me it seems a lot easier to understand bad actors in the nighttime. Nobody should be approaching the front of the store, and we can talk more about this later, but LiveView has some of those automatic deterrent profiles that can talk down to those folks. But it's tougher in the day. Some of these folks walk in the store and it is really hard to tell. Are there any tips and tricks, anything you've seen generally that would be of value to the folks on this call for daytime kind of understanding what the bad actors are?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

I really don't. I think that's a really great question. We suffer from the same opportunities during the day. You don't want to profile what a shopper looks like, so we really educate our teams to focus on behaviors. But during the day, we're really busy focused on replenishing the sales floor, taking care of our customers. And so that becomes a real challenge for us to that point. I mean, we rely heavily on our execution of sensor tagging to make sure that the product as it sits on the shelf and in the racks, that is a big enough deterrent for us, so that if we don't see the behaviors or can't identify what's happening, that's our kind of second line of defense. Right?

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's a tough question. I LiveView Technologies traditionally has played a role a lot more outside the store. And so we have that benefit of being able to track how people move around in the parking lot, and we're continuing to work on analytics and other new technologies to understand how we could help predict that behavior. But it is really tricky inside the store. Even outside the store is hard. Sometimes we've noticed that if you can track where they're going in the parking lot and hit in certain areas, you can understand that it's more of a loitering type person, more of an opportunist, more of a bad actor that is hanging out, seeing if somebody forgets to lock the car door or something like that. But definitely gets difficult once you get inside the store. So yeah, that's fantastic.

Anything else that would be helpful for this group to know on just trying to decrease these engagements, and then maybe how you measure that too? Are you being effective with the different methods that you're using?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, I mean a big part of my new job is we are constantly exploring solutions to address the shoplifter and identify how we can detect bad behavior, and then of course investigate bad behavior, or bad actors, if you will. Whether it's facial recognition or artificial intelligence, new cameras, better resolution cameras, new merchandise exposure standards, those are all things that we're constantly looking at to curb some of the loss. And I think those solutions are really important and they're definitely making an impact.

But I think from a measure, one of the things that we started working on you guys is the question comes up is, there's so much labor, time and energy involved in addressing a shoplifter once they come into the store. And saying the obvious is, "What if we just kept them out of the building?" If we kept them out of the building, then we have an opportunity to say we don't have to worry about safety concerns, number one. We don't have to worry about our employees trying to engage potential shoplifters. They can focus on the customer. And so if we can just keep the shoplifter out of the building, what does that mean for the business from a, I think efficiency standpoint, but again, most importantly from a safety standpoint?

As far as measuring goes, I mean our stores report a ton of activity in our reporting system. They do a great job with it, so it really gives us an opportunity to measure the effectiveness of a lot of the tools that we deploy.

Lorin Fotheringham:

That's fantastic. Thank you for that. Let's jump into our last segment and then we'll get into Q&A. This part's kind of exciting, a little bit more about our partnership, LiveView Technologies and our crime deterrence. So a couple of things that I would say as we're getting started, for those that are new to LiveView Technologies. These cameras are cutting edge. We have our own proprietary edge controller that actually sits here in the top of the unit, and it is helping to direct and manage all the data that comes through these cameras and also do alerts, alert profiles. These cameras can react differently, units can react differently in different situations. And so I think those were a couple of the exciting things to Dick's Sporting Goods as we've kind of gone over the last few years, and also our commitment to continue to introduce new cutting edge technology to help cut down on this.

But on this slide here, the history of Dick's Sporting Goods and LVT, like I said, it's been two to three years now that we've been working on different projects and trying to reduce risk, reduce shrink, and show great value back to Dick's Sporting Goods, in kind of a time of uncertainty, too. We talked a little bit about tracking statistics on the last slide, which has been really difficult. And you look at year over year, and how do you do that when last year maybe a bunch of these stores were closed for COVID or different hours and those types of things? So it's really hard to measure over time. Any thoughts on that, Jih-Hao, as you're looking at year over year statistics and the pandemic?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Just to back up, we deployed some of these units probably back in the late 2000s, mid 2019. So we've been testing the solution our last few years. And originally we thought, "Hey, this is a great solution." I mean, check out the cameras, they're amazing. The zoom technology was incredible. You can read a license plate from probably over a hundred yards away with great clarity. So we thought this would be a great post incident investigative tool to help our investigators and our field loss prevention team figure out, "Okay, we just had a grab and go. What was the color of the car? Where did they go? Do we have a license plate?" So we really thought that would be the big benefit of these.

So we started testing these units out, and you know what? We had some successes, and we closed some pretty good mid sized and large investigations as a result. But what we started to realize over the last couple years, is that the real value of this is the deterrence value. We tested these out by 16 stores the last two years, and we studied the activity pre-deployment of these units and then after the fact, and we saw significant double-digit decreases and reporting around grab and go shoplifting events, and more importantly, high-risk incidents. We saw some double-digit decreases.

And so as we started to do these informal surveys with the stores to figure out, "Wow, this unit's just sitting in the parking lot, what has caused it to be so effective?" I think a lot of our employees started saying, "Look, I think a lot of these shoplifters think somehow they're tied to law enforcement, potentially." We're not sure, but it created a huge deterrent value. And then a lot of our employees also said, "Hey, we actually feel a lot safer, not only for myself, but my vehicle parked in the parking lot. It's nice to know that there's cameras out there watching the parking lot." So that's where we've actually seen the biggest bang for our buck. Not that the technology, as Lorin has shown you, is not phenomenal. It's incredible, but the deterrence value has actually been the bigger ROI for us.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, thanks for bringing that out, Jih-Hao. And we've heard that from some of our other strategic partners as well. It's when a bad actor enters the parking lot and sees one of these things in there, there's just somewhere else to go and try and be an opportunist, right? Because they don't know. It's that question of, what is this thing doing? How capable is it?

And we've looked at a number of different kind of models in making sure that these things are providing high value for our customers. And it's been really interesting to see the different ideas and different use cases and the different settings. And what I mean by that is, we put these in parking lots and not turn on a thing and not set anything. And sometimes we put them in parking lots and turn on every single strobe and turn on audio deterrence. And we can even stack surveillance on top of this too, if you want somebody to be able to talk through live to any of these bad actors.

What we found over time is, if you do have strobes on and you do have these things talking, the deterrence alone, people are seeing up to a 70% reduction in incidences. And that may be shrink, that may be criminal things. It could be a lot of different things there, but a 70% reduction is very huge. And we've got a white paper on that. We can send the link out at the end. But yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up, Jih-Hao, and what you saw with regards to that.

And the other thing that you mentioned is closing cases, and we've seen that also with some of our other strategic partners from, in a recent value call, from actually even a raid that had begun in a parking lot and was able to go back and get a license plate from where that interaction began. Reduction in shootings, we have a white paper on that as well. And a few other... One that we see a lot more is vehicle theft, and we're able to get identification on a few of the folks and help close those cases.

So let me take one more second while we're talking about this, Jih-Hao, and then I can turn back over to you for any other thoughts of the partnership with LVT and value. But what you're seeing here on my screen right now is what we call our VMS, or Video Management System. And we were able to put a camera essentially, basically out in the middle of nowhere. I think this is about seven miles from any civilization. We've got a company that's looking at doing a cabin, building a few cabins out in this area. And anytime there's any construction going on, I think most people know lumber costs these days and the theft that goes on there.

And so we had this opportunity and partnership to put this unit out there. And as you can see, the unit's on patrol right now. So it's going to go around to the different presets, look at different areas. It can be zoomed in on different presets, it's recording, and the recording can be downloaded back from our cloud through the archives tab up here at the top. And it also can be put on, the different deterrent profiles can be activated, so if somebody crosses a line, you can receive an email. If you want to have things really secure, you can have that on in the day and or night. And so there's a lot of options from even just what you see right here.

And then the other thing I'd mention quickly is command center. If you're looking at doing quite a few of these units, we have partners that have up to hundreds of these units, there's an opportunity to have a command center, which is really more of your 24/7 monitoring piece, and we can be tracking those alerts over time, tweaking and tuning settings to help hopefully shrink those alerts down over time. Those may be intrusion alerts or whatnot that these cameras can provide back. So wanted to take just a couple of seconds there to talk about what folks are seeing on this VMS piece, and then I'll jump back to our slides.

Any other thoughts there, Jih-Hao, on the partnership? And you mentioned the deterrents, which is fantastic, and I think that's what a lot of folks are looking for, just stopping things at the root. Anything else you would add to that piece?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, absolutely. Just in terms of the technology, one of the nice things that we find really beneficial with these live units is, they're mobile. Unless you're going to go probably miles and miles away, you can actually buy a hitch, throw it on your car and tow it down in the street, the store down the street, which is really nice because you always see theft migrate from one store to the next or one market to the next. So the mobility of this is actually really, really beneficial since if we see theft trends change or move or migrate, we can easily pick up that unit and move it.

But the other part of it too is, as I mentioned, safety is our paramount concern over a shrinking profit. So we do deploy a lot of off-duty police coverage and uniformed security guards, and we think it's the right thing to do, right? It's a great deterrent of course, and lets our potential bad actors know that we have people in the store, they're going to address any potential concerns. But it's also, as you all probably know, a really expensive proposition. And so where we can and where we will, is leverage these units as an opportunity to supplement or help curb some of the loss by putting these units out front. It's really caused us to think more and more about like, "Okay, we're investing a lot of time and energy in deterrence factors inside the store. How do we continue to do that outside of the store?" So that's just what I wanted to add there, Lorin. Thank you.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, definitely. And the other thing that I would add real quick too, at the bottom you talk about guards. And I mentioned this briefly, but in the VMS too where I was just showing, there is the opportunity to call a phone number and talk down live out of these units. So if you pair that in with some of the alerting and analytics that goes on, it can be very powerful, and you can look a little bit more at a one-to-many approach instead of possibly having a guard at each location, which is extremely effective. Having a guard that is monitoring five or six locations and looking at alerts and responding based on the alerts, based on someone coming into a bounding box or a certain area of the parking lot, and then them being able to talk down live to those people. And we do have an offering as well at LiveView Technologies where you can lean on us for that, or if you have your own folks there at whatever business that you've got, they can do the same thing. They can talk down live.

And from what we're seeing, the deterrence doubles down. So just having the unit in the parking lot makes a huge difference, up to 70%. We're also seeing when you talk down to someone from the unit, we're seeing 50 to 70% of those folks will leave when you call out something specific to them. If they're wearing an orange hoodie, or they're sitting in a certain area and you call that out and you let them know they need to leave immediately and law officials have been notified, we're seeing a very high amount of those folks that are being talked down to leave.

So you talk about bad actors, you talk about changing that, what that trajectory looked like of what they were going to do that night or that day, that's another piece where I think we have some benefit and can play. So anyway, wanted to bring that up. I don't know if you have any other final thoughts, Jih-Hao, on what that looks like and augmenting guards and the talk down, any alerts, anything like that?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean just the presence alone, it's hugely beneficial, but these added technology features are great. And I hope I'm not jumping the gun, Lorin, because I didn't ask you, but one of the things we're about to start doing is a pilot or beta test with LiveView around license plate reader technology. So that's something we're really excited about, is to be able to capture license plate information against the database and see what happens. So we'll have better deterrent value and we'll also have some even improved investigator value too. Hopefully I didn't jump the gun there.

Lorin Fotheringham:

No, no, I actually appreciate you bringing that up. License plate recognition is a big up-and-coming thing. It's fantastic because it can help close cases, but it's a little bit of a double-edged sword or a scary thing because there are some laws out there that you've got to abide by in certain states with regards to license plate technology. And so we've already begun our journey down that road and we do offer a license plate technology, reading technology, and we're also trying to understand how to best advise customers from a legal standpoint. So we're down that road right now.

But what we can do currently, and what we're looking at doing with Dick's Sporting Goods is, we've got a camera technology that can essentially detect when a car is coming into a parking lot and can snap a picture of the license plate. And then all you really see each day, depending on how you want to set it up, is a report that comes in. "Here's a list of all the plates that came into your facility or your area," and it can do egress and ingress, and it's huge for closing cases. If you can get that license plate, it's a game changer if something bad happens and it can be tied back to a license plate. So thank you for bringing that up. That's another big piece that we're working on right now, is that offering for our customers.

Okay. Jih-Hao, I know we're getting close to the end here of our segment and we'll kick it back over to Mat here for a Q&A. But before we do that, anything else that I may have missed? Any other pieces that you think would be helpful for this group to recap? We've talked about the security issues facing retailers currently. We've talked about deterrence, what that can really do for folks on this call and what it's done for Dick's Sporting Goods, and then really specifically with the partnership and what we've been able to do to help deter some of the bad actors that have shown up at Dick's Sporting Goods over the last couple of years. Any final thoughts or anything else to add?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, just I think we're really excited to continue to work with LiveView to see where this can go. The more and more we study this and see its effectiveness really makes us decide... Again, I go back to this really easy thought that if we can just keep folks out of the building, bad actors out of the building, that makes all of our lives easier. And really at the end of the day, it protects our customers and our employees. So that's all I really have. Thank you.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, before I kick it over to you, Mat, I just want to thank you Jih-Hao, for jumping on. I love our partnership. We've been able to accomplish great things in just the last year, and it's been fantastic. So thank you again for joining us today and going through some of these questions and sharing some of your industry knowledge. Very impressive background. So thank you again. Mat, I'm going to kick it over to you for the Q&A piece.

‍Mat Schriner:

Absolutely. So we have some questions from registration. We also have some in the chat. We do ask the any and all questions that you have, you enter into the Q&A box. But first question, can you speak to any major city metropolitan area applications for this technology?

‍Lorin Fotheringham:

Jih-Hao, do you want to go first or do you want me to? I got one I can talk about.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

I think they're great in the retail environment, but I think that question maybe be geared towards, for you. Absolutely.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, so one piece, and I'll just talk briefly about this. But in a few states, kind of more in the northwest of the country, and I think even some parts of California, they're looking at decriminalizing theft up to a certain dollar amount. And so that can make things really, really tricky and scary. And so we've had some other partners with really close eyes on that and understanding really what that looks like.

Some of it was working with local government and making sure things were going the right way. Some of it was getting live view units in there, really understanding what that looks like, what's going on, who these folks are and how we can influence that to not happen, along with keeping law enforcement up to speed on everything that's going on there and some of the politics involved. But it was fun to play a role in that, but we have seen that as a little bit of a hotspot with some of those unique challenges in that area.

Mat Schriner:

Gotcha. The next question we have, I'm going to break this up into two parts. How often are you losing a unit and or are they being vandalized? And the second part is, who's responsible for that damaged or stolen unit at that point? Is it the retailer or is it LiveViewTechnologies?

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's a great question. Oh, sorry. Go for it Jih-Hao.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah, I'll let Lorin answer the back end piece of it, but all the units we have, we have never had any units stolen or vandalized. So Lorin, I'll let you handle the other part of the question.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, no, that's great. It's very few and far between. I don't believe we've ever had a unit stolen that we haven't been able to go back and retrieve. A lot of the reason being is, the second these units are turned on, they have a cellular chip set in them and they have a modem. And so we're able to really track where they are. We can GPS ping these. So as far as units going missing, it hasn't really happened. Of the thousands of units we have out there, we've seen a very, very small handful of the head unit be tampered with and one or two times the head unit stolen, and I believe so far we've been able to go back, and the second they are able to power up the head unit to try and figure out what's going on, what they need to do, it takes a picture of the person. And so we've been able to get those back pretty much every single time.

We're also increasing and looking at a few changes within our technology where, we talked about alerts earlier. We have alerts now that are releasing from beta where if the mast is lowered, so if somebody's trying to steal that camera, it will pop an alert and it will go to us. If anybody that's subscribed to it from Dick's Sporting Goods would also be able to see that alert saying, "Hey, the mast is being lowered." So usually at that point too, the way the cameras work, it goes down, it just starts taking pictures and live video of who's lowering it, and then that is getting saved to the cloud. So even if they do take the cameras and take off, we've got a lot of that video in the cloud that we can go back and request.

So losing a unit, no. Vandalizing, sometimes. A lot of times it's accidental, somebody opening a car door and hitting one of the jacks or accidentally running into as they're backing out of a stall or something like that.

And you talk about who's responsible for damage. It depends on the model that you use to partnership with LiveView technologies. So if you're more of a buy the unit type of a scenario, then a lot of that would fall to you if you've purchased the unit. We also have a subscription model that's kind of the up-and-coming thing. In the subscription model, we're able to cover a lot of those things that will happen to the unit. We have insurance on these units. If it is somebody rams into it with a car, hopefully there's some insurance from the person, the customer, and in the parking lot. So we kind of have to look at each one of those and see, "Hey, what happened?" But all the warranty, all that kind of stuff we cover on the units, and maintenance and all that kind of stuff in the subscription model.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent, thank you. So next question, and this is more geared towards Jih-Hao, have you seen a significant increase in incidents and fraud at your stores in this past year?

Jih-Hao Cheng:

Yeah. I mean unfortunately I can't be very specific, but I would tell you since, last several years we continue to see pretty elevated increases in theft activity reported by the stores, and obviously the fraud is well attached to it. So absolutely. It's incremental, pretty significant increase year over year.

Mat Schriner:

Okay, excellent. Next question, Lorin. So this is more for LiveView Technologies, I'm sure Jih-Hao could probably answer it as well, but do the units actually hold any video locally, or is it all uploaded to the cloud?

‍Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, it's a good question. They do hold video locally. So we've got some proprietary technology, it's hooked to a single state hard drive. And depending on the use case, we can fit up to two terabytes of video on that unit. And we're not passing everything to the cloud. That's kind of part of the secret sauce of the edge controller. It knows what to pass to the cloud and it knows when to queue back to pull that video. So everything can be accessible from the cloud, but much of the video is stored on the SSD there in the unit.

What we generally see is it gives you about a month of footage that you can call up at any time. And around that time, depending on settings, it will write over itself, which is kind of nice because most of the time folks know within two, three days, sometimes a matter of minutes, there was an incident that we need to go back and pull. And so we've got that piece of it, but also you're not necessarily liable for coverage from three, four years ago. So we try and balance it out with that SSD. That's a good question.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent, thank you. Next question, what are the challenges in regards to installation and setup of a unit if you have one that's going to a facility?

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, so install and set up, there is a configuration piece to these units, and depending on how you choose to have the unit set up, it can be a little bit more advanced, or pretty basic. The long and short of it is, to set up a unit, if it gets pulled off of a semi and set into a parking lot, it takes a technician that we'll send out about 25 minutes to just prop everything up, get everything powered on, and then it takes about five to 10 minutes for a person that is here at LiveView Technologies as one of our support folks to get everything configured correctly to make sure everything's set up. So there is kind of a two-step process, the hardware and the software set up. And then if the unit is moved, it does take a little bit of a recalibration. So these units are set up with these presets and so the presets would need to be reset, and then some of the bounding boxes redrawn at that point.

The future I would give a little glimpse to is, as you looked at this VMS here, we've been running that software for a little while now. We do have other things in development where we want to be able to give users more freedom into changing those settings. If they want to turn the strobes on and off, if they want to change a deterrent profile or something like that, or maybe even upload what they want this unit to say, rather than sending that to us and us putting it through the unit, they'd be able to do that directly into VMS. So there's some future state things there as well, but that's kind of what setup looks like.

‍Mat Schriner:

Okay, excellent. And there's several questions in the chat around, how are the units powered and do you have any mitigation items on the unit to try and prevent damage from vehicles and or other things that are in the area?

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, so how are the units powered is a really good one. Most of our units are powered by the sun, fully. So we have an internal tool that's a solar predictor. We can put a zip code in there and it will tell us if the unit would go down based on the zip code. What we usually see is 80 to 90% of the time when we put a unit through that process, it doesn't require anything and it just runs off the sun. There are, depending on exactly the configuration of the unit, there are around eight batteries that reside inside the unit that can keep the unit powered on for days at a time if there is an extended storm or something happens or some random clouding or shading issues. We also have tools that, we call it a shading tool, where at different times of the year the sun hits differently and it causes shade in different areas.

And so when we configure these units and set them up, we're running all those different systems to make sure that they're set up optimally so that you don't need a generator. One piece I would say there though, let's say that you're trying to put one of these units in Alaska or somewhere where solar is going to be an issue. We do have a secondary power option. We call it EFOI, it's essentially a methanol fuel cell. It's cutting edge technology that's able to power these units for months at a time without solar. And we're building a process right now to be able to refuel those. We can ship the methanol, and it's basically plug and play tanks that go in there and then if the sun is having issues, it will power off those fuel cells. So we've got that part covered as well if it is a low sun area.

Mat Schriner:

Wow, that's awesome.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

I'd also say too, we've got a unit in Seattle where it's always cloudy and always rains, and that we've never had a solar power issue. So it'll work pretty well.

Mat Schriner:

That's fantastic. And we had one come into the Q&A box that I was thinking as you mentioned storms, so what's the procedure for hurricanes and tornadoes? Can the store teams pull these down if needed, or what's the rating for wind on one of these units in the event there is a severe storm?

‍Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, that's a really good question. So to my knowledge, we've had one or two, one or two units that have been severely damaged in a high wind storm. And yes, somebody could come out and lower the mast. We do have jacks that go out on all sides, go down, and so it will lift the tires off the ground, and there are holes in those plates. So if you wanted to technically stake this thing down into a parking lot, drill it in, then it would probably be fine and last through most of those storms. Depending on how you have it set up, it can affect it.

What we've really found though is that after the hurricanes and tornadoes is when these units really come into effect, because that's where you'll get a lot of smash and grab, a lot of craziness going on. And so at that point, what we really like to do is turn off all the deterrents, turn off the strobes, make it act like the unit's down, and then as people are attacking a store or causing harm, we can get a lot of those, picture, video, all that kind of thing. And we've got plenty of time after the incidents to go back and make sure that things are righted.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent. Next question, can you speak to what the average is on clients that take advantage of central monitoring of these units versus just using the VMS, and can they be ported into a store's VMS when a unit is on site?

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yes, we are working on more integrations to be able to pull them into a store's existing VMS. There's a limited number available right now, more coming online soon. I would say that's an up and coming trend. A lot of people, a lot of customers, as they're getting started, they're like, "Hey, we're going to handle it. We'll just talk down. We'll manage these alerts." Come to find out there's a lot going on.

And there's every now and again too, you'll have a deer or a really big dog or something walk past the front of a store, and if it's almost the same size as a human, if it was standing up, it will trigger an alert. So they're like, "Oh dang, now we got this alert, we didn't need to do anything with it." So those things can happen as well. And I think as customers are understanding what this really looks like to manage, they're starting to say, "Let us do what we do. Maybe you do what you do, and have us monitor it more." That be it. We do have big customers that are in command center monitoring it themselves. So I would say we kind of have a mixed bag there, and we've seen both.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent. And can you speak a little bit about the live time for your VMS, your web-based platform? Does that ever go down, or is it up pretty well nonstop? And Jih-Hao, I know you're a user, so I'm sure they're interested to hear from you on this question as well.

Jih-Hao Cheng:

We have not had an issue with, whether mobile or desktop, monitoring. Yeah, it's been very, very seamless for us.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent.

Lorin Fotheringham:

Yeah, I would say the VMS side of things, I've only in probably the last year been aware of one short outage, and during that time, as things were getting upgraded, the units were still recording, so you could go back and pull archive video from that time, and it was just a couple of minutes. Other than that, I don't think we've had a single blip in the VMS throughout the whole last year. So your uptime, I don't know how many exactly nines that extends out to, but it's quite a few. The units also, we see very good up times. As I mentioned earlier, there can be some shading issues that we're monitoring all that for our strategic partners and helping them understand what that looks like. But that's our biggest thing, right? You're paying for something, you want it to be up and working, you want eyes on, and so we take that part very seriously from a VMS and a unit perspective.

Mat Schriner:

Excellent. Well, that seems to be the questions that we have for now. So I am going to move into a couple of announcements. So first and foremost, thank you to LiveView Technologies for sponsoring today's session. They are also sponsoring a 20% discount off of the LPF memberships and our courses. If you're interested, we will put this in the post webinar email blast. The promo code is DETERRENT, all in caps.

And we are also giving away, five random attendees will receive a free LPC course scholarship courtesy of LiveView Technologies. So be on the lookout for that email tomorrow, as you might be one of the lucky recipients of a free LPC course scholarship.

Again, we thank you for joining us today. We look forward to having you on future LPF webinars. Stay safe and have a great rest of your week.