How to Make Public Sector Webcasting Simple and Successful

  • By: admin
  • February 8, 2018

For local governments and public sector organizations, video streaming is quickly becoming an essential tool for citizen engagement and improving the transparency of their meetings and proceedings. However, when selecting which streaming service to use, the number of providers and options can seem overwhelming.

Some vendors may be fine for entertainment-oriented streaming, and others may offer many advanced features, but they often have significant limitations for integrating with government or education public meeting requirements. Other offerings may seem appropriate but require too much technical knowledge or IT support.

Streaming options can also vary considerably in cost, capabilities and complexity. Which features do you really need, and how do you make sure you’re choosing a platform that will meet your needs for the long-term, not just today?

Keys to Streaming Success

To help you make the right choices without needing to become a technical expert yourself, we’ve compiled a baker’s dozen of key things you should consider when selecting a video streaming service. We’ll start by looking at the first six considerations.

1. Automated operation with minimal manual effort

Tie webcasting control to meeting session management. You and your colleagues have enough to do during meetings without having to handhold your streaming system. Look for a solution that automates the streaming process as much as possible, minimizing error-prone manual steps. Features like one-click streaming/recording free your staff to focus on the meeting itself, while the ability to monitor video and audio status from their seats gives them ongoing confidence in your streams.

2. Automatic time-stamping of agenda and minute items

Video_live
Click to enlarge

Help your citizens quickly find what they need. Many viewers of your meeting videos will only be interested in a specific agenda or minute item. Bookmarking these points in the video lets viewers jump directly to what they want to see, without scrubbing through the entire video to find it. Choose a service that can automatically time-stamp the video as it is captured and link the bookmarks to the minutes (or post-meeting agenda) on your website, letting you improve the viewer experience without time-consuming, after-meeting effort.

3. Automated, real-time closed captioning

It may sound like science fiction, but Artificial Intelligence with Deep Learning is becoming part of the engagement and accessibility story. Today, closed captioning of your videos is essential for providing transparency to the widest range of constituents, and a regulatory requirement for complying with expanding accessibility standards in many jurisdictions. Tomorrow, real-time translation may be a requirement in certain environments.

Many streaming services require closed captioning to be performed manually and/or added to your video as a separate step after recording. Instead, look for a provider that offers accurate, automatic closed captioning in real time, minimizing effort and turnaround time. Ideally, the solution you select should take advantage of technology developments in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning Systems by incorporating a ‘trainable’ closed captioning engine that can master proper names and the particularities of pronunciation. That same technology could be harnessed in the future to provide real time translation, giving you a path to tomorrow.

4. Splash screens for breaks or closed sessions

Splash Screens Screenshot

Avoid blank screens and embarrassing silence on your webcasts. You don’t want to stream the feed from your live cameras during breaks or closed sessions, but what should your viewers see if they access your streams during these times? Empty black screens or “stream not available” messages frustrate your audience. Choose a solution that lets you display informational splash screens during closed sessions and breaks to keep your viewers interested and engaged, and lets you upload multiple splash screens in advance so you have something ready to display even for unexpected events.

5. Unlimited storage, data and viewers

As always, the first rule for storage is to plan for as large an amount as possible, as you will ultimately need it. High-quality video can consume massive amounts of storage capacity – think terabytes (TB), not just gigabytes (GB) – particularly when archiving multiple years’ worth of recordings. Many streaming services limit how much storage you can use, or charge fees based on storage consumption. Similarly, many providers limit or charge based on the number of viewers who can watch streams simultaneously, or on the amount of streaming data you’ve delivered. Look for a service that offers unlimited storage, data transfer and viewer concurrency for a fixed cost, with no usage-based charges.

Quality and bitrates_final

6. Domestic storage repository

Keep control of where, and how, your information is stored. While storing and serving your video through a third-party service offers many advantages over doing so on your own infrastructure, the location where data is stored by the service provider is of increasing concern to many organizations and their constituents. Privacy legislation, data security regulations and legal obligations for providers to share data with authorities outside of the country of origin all vary significantly between jurisdictions. Be sure to choose a service provider who stores your data in your own country.

Digging Deeper

These are just a few of the important attributes you should consider when evaluating and selecting a video streaming service for your transparency initiatives.

Download Our White Paper

To learn more about the above topics and to discover the rest of our top 13 keys to streaming – including considerations for fault tolerance, breaking down bandwidth barriers, viewing device compatibility, retaining your intellectual property rights and more – download our free white paper, “Key Considerations for Public Sector Webcasting”.

Learn More

And when you’re ready to start or improve streaming your meetings, contact us to learn how the Webcasting Plus module for our meeting management software lets you stream without limits while meeting the needs and expectations of your constituents and stakeholders.