AGENDA #8a
to: W. Calvin Horton, Town Manager
from: Sabrina M. Oliver, Town Clerk
subject: Indexed Video and Audio Streaming of Council Meetings
date: March 8, 2006
The purpose of this report is to recommend that the 2006-07 budget include an allocation of $31,000 to purchase software that would allow on-demand video streaming of Council meetings. In addition to this initial software cost there are monthly service costs of approximately $700.
In keeping with the Town Council’s commitment to openness and accessibility, the Town Clerk’s Office sees an opportunity to enhance the public’s accessibility to Council meetings by offering online videos of each meeting. When citizens miss the cablecast program, they now must come to Town Hall to view the meeting or purchase a copy of a DVD or video tape. Council meetings are aired on cablevision, but only on a limited basis.
The purpose of this memorandum is to request support of technology that will provide live and on-demand streaming audio and video over the Internet. Citizens would be able to view Council meetings live or specific portions of Council meetings at any convenient time. This technology will also link all supporting documents, agendas, and minutes to the audio and video file creating an integrated public record available through the Town’s web site.
DISCUSSION
The most important advantage of this technology is to offer citizens full access to public meetings, documents and audio/video on the Town’s web site. Citizens would view meetings on-demand, with a search capability that generates descriptions similar to a “Google” search page. Each result would have a brief description with links that open the meeting’s video and accompanying minutes at that precise point within the meeting.
Using minutes that are linked to the video would provide a comprehensive and detailed transcript for constituents. Users would be able to quickly navigate to any point in a meeting.
Currently, the Town Clerk’s Office contracts out the transcription of Council minutes. Minutes are detailed summaries of meetings and take days to transcribe, edit and finalize. Indexed video audio streaming would allow the Town to quickly publish electronic action form minutes with links to the audio/video summaries which are inserted into the minutes document. The audio/video links would provide a full transcript of what was said at the meeting as a replacement to the Town Clerk’s annotation of those discussions.
This technology would allow faster creation, editing and publishing of the minutes document. The Clerk would be able to create a “live” minutes draft during the meeting thus decreasing the amount of time between the meeting and creation of the final minutes document.
Another advantage of this technology is that the end user would be able to view the video and all supporting documentation in one window/web page. Persons who do not have cablevision service in the Chapel Hill franchise area would be able to observe Council meetings over the Internet.
The City of Wilmington has recently subscribed to a streaming service and we understand that the City of Winston-Salem and Onslow County are scheduled to be up and running in a month or so. One vendor reports that about 100 cities and counties nationwide subscribe to such technology. We believe the numbers would be far higher when all vendors were included.
The service available from one vendor involves both a one-time cost for acquiring the software and a monthly fee for video streaming. The one time cost is approximately $31,000 and the monthly fee is $700. Currently the $14,000 budgeted for transcription of the minutes could be reduced to $2,000.
We recommend the Town Clerk budget for 2006-07 be adjusted to add $31,000 for software and $8,400 for the monthly service charges to implement the streaming video capability; and that the cost of transcription services be reduced by $12,000.