It makes absolute sense considering the live video feed is probably coming via a motorized 3-axis tracking Ku-band maritime VSAT system. If you look at aerial photos of the drone ships you can see the radome.
I suppose if they wanted to keep a feed up it would be possible to connect the cameras/network equipment on the ship to something with an ordinary 10Gbps 1310nm LX fiber SFP+ in it, attach 1 km of submarine rated fiber optic cable to a series of floats, and run a fiber optic cable to a small nearby ship with the satellite uplink mounted on it.
Yeah, it'd have to be some kind of weird setup with the fiber coming off an extension arm sticking out from the side of the barge, and then at an angle into the water. Dynamic positioning vessels generally don't take kindly to having rope shaped things hanging around in the water near their thrusters.
If you have a ship nearby with the VSAT uplink, another way to do it would be a really low cost IP data point to point link in the 900 MHz band, even if the fresnel zone is deep into the water, it'll be good enough for 15-20 Mbps of traffic. Way more than the bitrate of the video coming off that camera.
Something like two Cambium PMP450i radios, two dual polarity 3 ft long yagi antennas, set up as a layer 2 ethernet bridge. The spread of that type of link's RPE in the 900 band means that as long as the VSAT uplink ship had some ability to stationkeep relative to the barge, you wouldn't even need motorized tracking antennas on both barge + uplink ship.
Iridium in its current form is 2400-3000 bps... The next generation network is not really commercially available yet. Can't squeeze much h265 video through that.
I suppose if they wanted to keep a feed up it would be possible to connect the cameras/network equipment on the ship to something with an ordinary 10Gbps 1310nm LX fiber SFP+ in it, attach 1 km of submarine rated fiber optic cable to a series of floats, and run a fiber optic cable to a small nearby ship with the satellite uplink mounted on it.