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Gloucester now streaming meetings on-demand online

11/10/2011

The county's schools and government cable channels will be seen as well

Gloucester County is now in the streaming media business.

Gloucester County, VA - The county now shows public meetings online at http://www.gloucesterva.info/streamingportal in an effort to be make government more transparent to citizens. The county's community education and information technology departments have been working on enhancing the county's cable channels' presence on the web, said George Bains, the county's director of information technology.

The new features include streaming of both cable channels 47, county schools, and 48, county government, and on-demand viewing of meetings and special programs.

"This is new for the schools and an enhancement for the county," Bains said. "We're real excited about it."

The on-demand meetings include the Board of Supervisors, School Board and Planning Commission meetings as well as high school athletic contests, concerts and theater productions.

The initiative came out of the county's Cable Communications Program and was funded with money from Gloucester's franchise contract with Cox Cable Communications, said county spokesperson Christi Lewis. No funds were taken out of the county's general fund, she added.

The start-up cost was $24,805.50, which included required equipment, initial set-up, server storage and on-going services, Lewis said.

This cost was taken out of the Cable Communications Program budget, which is funded through the franchise fees and educational/government contribution provided to the county from Cox Communications, she said.

The Cable Communications Program Committee recommended this service be started approximately a year ago.

Funds were made available through the Capital Improvement Program process on July 1 and the committee moved forward with service planning and implementation, finalizing the services in mid-October.

"We waited a few weeks to work out any glitches before making it public Nov. 1," Lewis said.

County and school staff have been trained to upload the agendas, index and publish the meetings to the web, Bains said.

The new features will allow viewing the two channels live over the Internet, and also offers the option to watch the meetings on demand, and by viewing the agenda of that meeting, to go right to a certain part of the meeting.

The feature was introduced at the Nov. 1 Board of Supervisors meeting.

The county partnered with Granicus, a San Francisco-based company that distributes live and on-demand streaming media content to support and enhance public meeting communications, internal training and public education programs for government.

The company provides services to more than 700 clients nationwide, including the cities of Hampton, Newport News, Suffolk and Chesapeake and Isle of Wight County.

Source
By By Eric Gillard, egillard@dailypress.com
Dailypress.com