City council recording and live streaming solution Sint-Gillis-Waas

Conferencing technology at its best: seamless integration of a recording and live streaming solution into the Sint-Gillis-Waas city council’s conferencing system.

Advanced live streaming and recording options for Sint-Gillis-Waas’ city council meetings

Sint-Gillis-Waas is a medium-sized city nestled against the Dutch border near Antwerp, Belgium. With a population of around 20,000, it is surrounded with forests, orchards, and polders. It is also not unknown to Televic as the municipality is a customer for whom we had already equipped the city council meeting room in the past.

Need for a comprehensive live streaming and recording solution

For public information and transparency reasons, the city council meetings led by mayor Maaike De Rudder were already streamed live on the city’s Youtube channel. But in the existing audiovisual set-up only the audio was also recorded. As digitalization was pushed to new levels due to the pandemic outbreak, the city council decided to go one step further. They decided to invest in a conferencing system upgrade to integrate full audio and video recording and streaming capabilities, live or on demand.

As, thanks to a frame agreement with the Flemish regional government, municipalities can purchase conferencing equipment at a fixed price and without resorting to a call for tenders, the city of Sint-Gillis-Waas directly reached out to Televic again. Together with our audiovisual integration partner Whitemilk, and streaming solutions specialist Streamovations, we proposed and demonstrated a new conferencing system set-up with tabletop units, a camera tracking system and an integrated live streaming and recording solution.

Tabletop discussion system with gooseneck microphones

In terms of conferencing units, the city council only needed a basic tabletop discussion system. They purchased 29 Confidea T-DD delegate units and one Confidea T-CD chairperson unit. The Confidea T model is user-friendly, immune to mobile phone interferences and easy to install. Besides, the daisy chain installation is easy to maintain and simplifies cable management. Given the narrowness of the table in the Council Chamber, the conferencing units were equipped with 30-cm D-Mic gooseneck conferencing microphones that deliver a rich and natural sound.

Camera tracking system

To integrate an automated camera tracking system, Sint-Gillis-Waas opted for Televic’s T-CAM Package, including two point-tilt-zoom cameras that are easy to configure and render crystal-clear videos. The T-CAM cameras can automatically switch to close-ups of the current speaker. This way, remotely following a city council meeting through video becomes a much easier and more dynamic experience.

Cloud-based streaming and recording software

In the new set-up, streaming and recording of the city council meetings is facilitated by Streamovations’ cloud-based software, Encoder Studio. This software enables to stream meetings and events on multiple platforms. It can also be used to optimize videos for live streaming and recording, post-production, and transcoding.

The recorded videos are hosted on the Streamovations platform, and they are visible directly on the city’s website. The agenda items are listed under the recorded videos, which facilitates the accessibility of the meeting to citizens who are only interested in specific topics. By clicking on an item of choice in the agenda, they can watch the corresponding segment of the video, and even choose which speaker they want to listen to about that topic.

The first live-streamed Council meeting took place on September 27th, 2021.

In the meantime, the new conferencing and streaming system is also used to broadcast public meetings of the social welfare services committee.