Travis County Commissioners Court

July 3, 2012 - Item A1
Agenda

A-1 is a matter involving the Commissioners Court ability to meet at 700 Lavaca in the future.
And we did discuss the legal aspect of this item.
There is some open court discussion regarding the logistics.
Especially involving the need for us to meet maybe at a couple of places for a short period of time.

>> Good afternoon, judge, Commissioners.
Steven brobert, director of management and communication resources.
With me is al jackson, director of media services.
We're just getting word of this last week that there may be a need to broadcast or to use this facility to record and/or broadcast between now and the end of the year.
Sounds primarily like they're budget sessions, but there may be a couple of others.
The technical and the operational issues are as follows: our ability to record other than doing shoulder cams or movable shots is an additional cost attached of about 25 to $30,000.
That is to keep this facility operational while we're in our new facility.
And the reason for that, of course, is that we can balance eyes much of the equipment from our studio in order to keep the cost down.
Fiscal responsibility ruled in this case.
In order to broadcast from this room once we move, the cost is about $60,000.

>> What's the cost just to broadcast audio?

>> Good question.
That's an al jackson question.

>> Broadcast audio on the tv channel?

>> Yeah.
What I'm thinking is just to do live feed audio.
Really?

>> Just putting up a slide and broadcasting the audio?
You will still use the same equipment to broadcast it.
I mean, you still will have to have a video carrier signal of some kind.
It's not like you're all of a sudden doing a radio thing.
If it's still on channel 17 on a tv set, even though you're not having moving pictures, you have a video signal of some sort.

>> What about audio streaming on the computer and just not doing it on channel 17?

>> That's possible, I suppose.

>> Just as a stopgap.
What I'm going for is the cheapest possible way so that individuals who want to monitor realtime can at least monitor audio via computer and then we could do, you know, a live shot static for archival purposing to up on the web as we normally do with text and video.

>> Yeah, that's the first time that idea has come up.
So I think it's going to require a little more research to determine what the parameters are to do live streaming.
But if we're going to do live audio streaming there isn't any reason we shouldn't do video streaming as well.

>> It doesn't save us a lot in terms of money.
It's already set up to do everything.

>> No, she's talking about just going to the web.

>> I'm talking live streaming just to the web.

>> Not to tctv.

>> Why don't we get you to review the options between now and next Tuesday.
And any court members requests or suggestions let media know and next Tuesday we'll come in more prepared to have a discussion.

>> Good.

>> In the meantime it seems to me that if we need to delay for a short period having meetings over there, we can do it, especially in view of some of the construction completion issues you mentioned and moving over there.

>> That's true, judge.

>> We need to put a pencil to it and decide whether we're talking about one week or three weeks.
If it's an issue we need to go ahead and address it now.

>> Yeah.
We need to address that fairly quickly.
I think next Tuesday we'll be prepared to have that discussion too.

>> Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> Unfortunately we kind of -- it was sort of brought forward on our radar at that meeting last Friday which is why I stuck it on the agenda late Friday afternoon.
But y'all didn't get a whole lot of notice of it.
Now I think we see some of the issues and appreciate them, so let's plan to have fuller discussion neck week.

>> Very well, judge.

>> Move adjournment.

>> Second.

>> All in favor?
That passes by unanimous vote.

The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.

July 3, 2012: Travis County Launches New Video Playback System

Our new streaming video system uses a single video clip for each session and items are linked to specific locations on that clip. Some browsers and mobile devices do not recognize the location information and display the entire clip. If this happens the "start time" will help you find your item's video within the larger clip.

If you encounter playback issues check out our video playback help page. If you still encounter problems let us know.

On July 3rd, 2012, Travis County began leveraging free resources by posting Commissioners Court meetings on Youtube. Previously every video clip was edited separately and hosted on the county's video server. The old system also required RealPlayer to view the video clips.

The new systems save time and resources -- and that saves taxpayer dollars!