The Government Video Boom

Streamin’ in Michigan
Two Sonic Foundry recorders, one rack mount and one portable, along with the company’s server-side streaming software and registration system make up the online video setup at the Michigan Public Health Institute (MPHI), a not-for-profit organization that provides streaming media services to several government agencies in Michigan. MPHI has recorded on-demand training videos, webcasted conferences, and even helped author Colleen Gleason launch the third installment of her book series, The Gardella Vampire Chronicles, according to Larry Doele, MPHI’s executive account manager.

"There were about 60 people who joined in for an hour," Doele says. "She released the book and talked about the book, and she was able to take questions from the audience via the Ask process within Mediasite."

MPHI has been working with Sonic Foundry for about 3.5 years, and the organization’s online video output has evolved significantly over that time, according to Doele. He says the organization started out webcasting conferences on health information technology for the Michigan Department of Community Health, and then expanded its services to include other agencies such as the Michigan Department of Education, for which several instructional videos detailing how to fill out forms and prepare for inspector visits were produced. Now MPHI is producing 35–40 webcasts for the Michigan Department of Treasury on unemployment insurance.

"With the state of Michigan and the economy that we’re having and the huge number of layoffs, that has just exploded the number of views that we’re getting on a daily basis," Doele says. MPHI is currently averaging about 500 views per day and expects to have about 180,000 by the end of the year.

While most of the videos MPHI produces are on-demand training videos, much like the DOD, Doele says that about 20% of its output is live. These live webcasts usually contain time-sensitive information or specific training that must be disseminated as quickly as possible. The organization is also preparing to webcast a live committee meeting featuring several guest speakers so that committee members who cannot attend the event in person can watch it online and ask questions.

"We’re getting more and more live, but that hasn’t really caught on," he says.

Doele says online video has benefited MPHI and the government agencies it works with in a number of ways. According to him, the more streaming media that MPHI produces, the more its unit costs go down. The organization can then give a "good portion" of those savings back to its customers.

MPHI is also able to accommodate agencies that need videos produced on an extremely short timetable. For example, Doele says customers have called him on a Monday informing him that they need to get a certain piece of information out to their viewers by Wednesday. Because of streaming media, MPHI is able to make that happen.

"We’ll go in Monday afternoon, record the presentation, and if there is any editing or any additional production work we have to do on it, we can get that done on Tuesday, and by Tuesday night, it’s up and ready to go," Doele says. "You look at value, you look at price, you look at speed of service. Streaming media provides that for all of us."

The Great White North
The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia’s streaming setup is all over the map: encoding equipment from ViewCast Corp., a CDN from InSync Software, Inc., a scheduling application from Sliq Media, and various services developed in-house. But it all comes together to enable the assembly’s broadcast division to stream and archive every session of the legislature, which meets daily, according to Darrell Norton, manager of Hansard broadcasting services for the broadcast division.

"It can be anywhere from 6 to 8 hours or longer of live web streaming," he says. "Everything is archived, and that archive actually gets linked up to portions of the written transcript."To do that, the division uses Sliq technology to record the audio of meetings, and then tasks a group of editors to listen to it on a video timeline and type it up. Those transcripts are posted on the assembly’s website, and readers can click on portions of text to be whisked away to the point in the archived video from which the words were taken, Norton says.

The assembly first got into streaming in 2003, and since then, it has done roughly 1,600 live webcasts, all of them archived and available on-demand. Norton says the decision to adopt online video was inspired by the British House of Commons, which began preliminary streaming operations around that time.

"That’s the mother of parliaments," he says. "So we were looking at that saying, ‘Yeah, this is definitely the way to go in the future.’"Once the assembly began posting online video, it quickly realized that it was attracting a younger demographic who "wouldn’t have sat in front of a television set to watch a lot of legislative proceedings," Norton says.

"We can get statistics to see where the interest is, where it lies, how many people are interested in which topics," he says. "That’s really valuable to us to know."

Live streaming also has benefits for assembly members, according to Norton. He says officers of the house can rewind the proceedings by several minutes while sitting in the chamber, allowing them to quickly review points that have come up in debate. The assembly’s online video archive also means that disseminating information to citizens who request it is much easier and more efficient.

"Rather than sending someone a DVD copy of material or a VHS copy or any other format, we can actually point to a direct link in the web stream and send that as a hyperlink, which means there’s no web traffic," Norton says. "In sending material, there’s no physical material transferred. It allows people to see just the clip that they want."

All in all, Norton says online video has been a tremendous help to the assembly, and he encouraged parliaments, agencies, and other organizations worldwide to get into the game before it’s too late.

"Having that presence, I think it’s expected now," he says. "To be working and doing business in the modern world, you do have to have that."

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