Live video streaming of city council meetings in the town of Livingston

The town of Livingston invested in a plug-and-play conferencing system for their city council room, with a built-in recording and live video streaming solution.

The Town of Livingston prioritizes transparency by streaming live from the city council room

Nestled in rolling green hills and hardwood forests, replete with creeks and streams and blessed with diverse wildlife, the Town of Livingston sits about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee. Recently this friendly, peaceful town of 4,020 inhabitants decided to invest in a new digital discussion system to professionalize their city council meetings, and to facilitate more transparency around all local government meetings.

A necessary upgrade for Livingston’s City Hall

Livingston forming no exception to the increasing need among local governments and city councils to provide more transparency to the public, the town’s city council room was due for an audiovisual upgrade. This upgrade concerned the City Hall conference room, as this room is used for every public meeting, including the Livingston City Council, the Planning Commission, and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.

Curtis Hayes Jr. Major of Livingston, expresses Livingston city council’s desire to accommodate the involvement of its inhabitants in local government affairs:

“We wanted to provide a more open government through live video streaming of our meetings. But we did not have video equipment in our City Hall conference room, nor did we have a speaker system. This made the discussions hard to hear and difficult to follow, especially for some folks.”

Discovering the simplicity of a digital discussion system

While attending a conference of the Tennessee Association of Municipal Clerks and Recorders, Mayor Hayes learned about Televic’s video and audio conferencing equipment. He reached out to Televic’s team of conferencing experts and inquired about the D-Cerno digital discussion system he saw at the event.

D-Cerno is Televic’s complete plug-and-play solution, especially intended to small or medium-sized conference rooms. It stands out because of its digital technology, elegant design and user-friendliness. There is no need for any specific technical knowledge to install or use the D-Cerno conferencing system. Up to 50 D-Cerno microphone units easily connect to a central engine. This central unit handles audio routing and provides built-in audio recording on a USB flash drive. This way, all participants can be clearly heard for transcription of minutes and archiving.

The Mayor and City Council tested the system and were impressed by the system’s quality and simplicity of operation. The council decided to invest 9 Televic D-Cerno microphones. These conference microphones have individual on/off switches. And because each microphone has a built-in speaker that amplifies the audio mix from the central unit, the town did not need to purchase a separate PA or meeting room speaker system. The Televic D-Cerno conference microphone system provided exactly what the town of Livingston needed, and this at an affordable cost.

From hard-to-hear public meetings to live video streaming

With the audio issues resolved, what remained was to find the best possible way to stream video of local government meetings and to archive them to the town’s website. Mayor Hayes found the solution in Televic’s T-Cam system. This is a package that includes 2 full HD point-tilt-zoom cameras, complete with the necessary software and equipment to facilitate streaming to the Internet.

The T-Cam system enables unattended video management of a meeting thanks to cameras that automatically move to a person as they push their microphone button to speak. Because the T-CAM system is compatible with any Televic microphone system, it easily combines with Livingston’s Televic D-Cerno discussion system to create a fully autonomous live streaming solution.

Major Hayes is absolutely pleased with the new solution:

“The camera system automatically follows the mics, and the video is crystal clear. Now we can live stream our meetings, archive the meetings for our records, and watch any meeting at will. Using Televic’s cameras and microphones, we are now able to provide a better form of open government.”