The City of Madison uses Mediasite to power its television channel, broadcasting public meetings, talk shows, ceremonies, PSAs, trainings and more.
The mission of the City IT Department’s Media Team is to make local government more accessible to the citizens of Madison, and provide city government with access to training and other valuable exchanges of public information. The Media Team operates Madison City Channel, which broadcasts more than 400 Mediasite videos a year. Those videos are available on the city’s online video library for live and on-demand viewing. Since the city began using Mediasite in 2010, the nearly 2,500 videos have received over 101,500 views online.
“Madison City Channel’s streaming video supports the city’s efforts to promote transparency and encourage citizen engagement,” said Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. “Viewers can watch as issues are debated and decisions are made. They can search thousands of on-demand programs for just the information they need. Mediasite makes it easy for our Media Team to record, organize, and present this content. It’s an excellent solution from a company based right here in Madison.”
The broadcasts include public meetings; public affairs programs; monthly talk shows with the mayor; panel discussions; award ceremonies; and police and fire recruitment graduations. The City Clerk Office and Madison Police Department also use Mediasite for internal trainings.
“Prior to Mediasite we had to combine a lot of different hardware and software to capture video and we had to make our own media management system. Mediasite has everything we need in one platform,” said Boyce Johnson, media team leader in the IT Department. “Mediasite is robust, integrated and flexible. The value of Mediasite is the combination of the capture and the streaming tools with the really robust organizing tools on the backend.”
“Mediasite analytics are a great tool for us because we could never get that insight with cable TV distribution. It’s nice from a larger standpoint to see what people are interested in. We do a lot of analysis of our meeting coverage to get an idea of what issues people are paying attention to,” Johnson said. “Anything involving the metro transit bus system always gets a spike in viewers, for example.”
“National, state and local governments depend on Mediasite for the most reliable and secure video capture, delivery and management, because it empowers departments and agencies to expand public outreach,” said Gary Weis, Sonic Foundry CEO. “The City of Madison is an impressive example of how a solid video strategy can build better connections with the public by getting a message out fast to a much wider audience. It’s an honor to partner with the City of Madison.”
Trusted by educational institutions, corporations and government entities, the patented Mediasite video content management and webcasting system quickly and cost-effectively automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos and rich media.
Photo Credit: Paul Schmidt, City of Madison IT Media Team