In the Race

This is actually incredibly simple and I have commented on this before on Bryan's blog.  Video surveillance/ CCTV and video broadcasting is moving more from MPEG-4 ASP to MPEG-4 AVC/SVC or H.264.  H.264 is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to provide more flexibility in video quality, storage requirements and bandwidth considerations.  There is no need to get complex for this application.  A quality camera, a PC or Mac, Quicktime Pro Encoder and access to iTunes (ITS) and your done.  You can also create video broadcasts in HD now.

I would shy away from a Webex or webcasting only because I doubt very many people would be watching the CC meetings live and even if they were, its not like they could participate in a citizen comment period anyway.  Many organizations such as Apple, Microsoft and media sites merely encode their video and post it for the person to download after the actual meeting and this should work just fine.

I agree with Alderman Taylor that the podcasts should be posted on the Franklin website, but I would suggest only a link to the  ITS.  The ITS has a plethora of content in podcast format available for free.  The City of Franklin website should just have a link going to the ITS.  iTunes is a free download and won't cost the people of Franklin a penny.  After downloading iTunes and visiting the City of Franklin link, citizens can subscribe to this podcast and anytime a new one appears on the site it automatically downloads to your PC or Mac and you can then push it to your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV etc. and take it with you in the car etc.  I haven't watched the news for years due to this ability.  Every day CNN, NBC News, MSNBC & Fox download right to my iPhone and I listen to it in the car or watch it on the treadmill.  This would be much more convenient than rather posting all of the video on The City of Franklin's website because if you forget to check if a new podcast is up your never going to get the podcast anyway.  Letting iTunes do it automatically is more convenient.

Most digital video contain watermarks to provide the ability to determine if someone has tampered with the original video, but were all adults here and I would trust that city hall's oversight would not require such a need for watermarking the video.

Part Two of the Common Council Meeting will not be an analogy on my part, and I assume all readers were