Simon Cooke asks on his blog how setting up the videoing of council meetings at Hampshire County Council could possibly cost nearly a quarter of a million pounds.

Easy.

First off, the council building is grade 2 listed. So there is the planning application which the council need to send to themselves to approve it. So there is the cost of putting that through the system. It doesn’t matter if the council decided to do it, they must always follow rules and procedures to the letter.

Then come the real expensive bits.

They’ve effectively costed out a major re-wire of the council building. This is to handle the many wires will be trailed all over the place to connect up the cameras (more than one) to the central editing suite. A room will have to be equipped for the editing with brand new high power computers and huge LCD screens. They need to be good enough to put subtitles and other graphics superimposed onto the live video. This room will be the most unsuitable so will need quite a lot of structural work, and it will need redecorating as well (though William Morris wallpaper has been excluded by the designer). Having done the video side, the council chamber will now need microphones at every location which will also need re-wiring amongst the benches. As mentioned in the newspaper article, any current microphones used to amplify voices to be heard in the public gallery are unsuitable and will be junked. Also, the current lighting setup will be found inadequate by the highly paid consultants who will recommend higher powered lights to ensure that the chamber shows up nicely on the video feed.

So that’s the main council chamber. Now for the mobile kit for other rooms. These will need wiring in to the specialist network. So multiply the cost of wiring by the number of potential meeting rooms. Don’t take into account that a room has never been used for meetings, it’s the potential that is important. These rooms will also need up to date microphones on the tables and any low energy light bulbs replaced with brighter florescent tubes. Extra cameras on dollies will be needed to handle the potential maximum number of concurrent meetings with a minimum of two per room with one manned for closeups and the other fixed for a wide shot.

So you’ve got the electricians providing power, the AV guys wiring in the video and audio. All done to the instruction by the consultants. They will be repeating work as they won’t be coordinated by the project manager. Then you’ve got the computer people installing and wiring up the specialist network to take the video feeds along with a server to record the video. The builders will be needed to upgrade the editing suite. And finally decorators to make it all look pretty afterwards as instructed by the designer. All looked after by a company which is paid lots of money to organise it all.

There is the on going cost of someone to look after the cameras and someone else to direct the video plus another person to ensure that the network is running smoothly with all the high bandwidth video feeds. And finally a runner to ensure that microphones in the chamber are all pointed correctly. Admittedly they will only be paid for when they actually work, so it won’t be a full time job. But you’re probably looking around £25K/yr for these specialist staff.

So this is how you come to your final bill of £223K over five years. But look at it another way it’s only costing just over £4500 each year to maintain and run the system. That’ll be cost of the electricity for the bright lights, the cameras and the big computers plus some set aside for repairs and replacements for broken kit. Dirt cheap ain’t it?

Bear in mind that the council has banned journalists and the public doing their own videoing of council meetings – effectively do the job for the council for free.

The fact that the video feed will end up on the Internet and downgraded to fit into a 2mb (typical) broadband connection watched on a laptop within a window taking up a quarter of the screen will be ignored. If this was taken into account then a single web-cam set up to feed via WiFi to a reasonably specified computer with off the shelf software to combine the video and the audio feed from the existing PA system and direct it out to the net would be more than adequate. For future playback YouTube or DailyMotion could be used.

Sure the quality won’t be brilliant but you’re not looking for broadcast quality output. But should a council need to look like it’s a professional business (don’t laugh at the back) so has to have the latest and greatest otherwise the electorate will laugh at them for having such a noddy setup, or can they get away with a something that is adequate and is “just enough” and no more.

Have I forgotten any other job creation schemes?

SBML

1
Geoff Coleman
October 22, 2011 at 18:17

Absolutely agree with your conclusion.

Providing a feed where there was no feed before – even if the quality is less than perfect – is a big step forward for local democracy.

But be prepared for criticism if you stream council meetings on a shoestring.

That said, the criticism is often from the sort of people who are never satisfied anyway, so it should not deter councils from trying something new – even if it is on a low budget.

2
Cascadian
October 22, 2011 at 23:37

SBML, you are an optimist, no council construction budget ever covers the necessary work.

While your scope- of-work is reasonably complete, allow me to present another equally likely scenario. The client does not really know what it wants (you have already established that with your comments about the content eventually ending up as a you-tube window) the resulting system will not satisfy the councillors. Everybody will be extremely flummoxed and the mayor will be heard to say “After spending two hundred thousand pounds of taxpayers money we must now spend a “small” incremental sum so that the system works to our electorates expectations, I’m sure the taxpayer understands”. No budget will be set because that is FOIable, the money will be drawn from the operating budget. The definition of “small” in local government is extremely elastic.

Additional fluorescents are just not going to be sufficient to light the chambers for filming and low-light lenses are awfully expensive, so additional stage type lighting is going to be required, they put out a fair amount of heat and the female councillors of a certain age are not going to enjoy that, so additional air conditioning and the corresponding builders work to hide the ugly ductwork are required. Additional lighting and a/c are power hungry, so at minimum a new electrical panel is required, maybe even a new service if the council chambers are like most old buildings. Then when they once again record the proceedings they realise the sound quality is poor, because they tried to save a few quid by not employing a mechanical consultant and the a/c hum is messing with the low frequency sound recording. What to do?- call in an acoustical consultant, why yes he can mitigate the problem with some acoustic “treatments” on the wall, have to be fire-resistant of course-expensive? why of course. So three years later and -oh say, half a million quid -the good people of Hampshire can ignore the local councillors debates just like the parliamentary debates.

Being wo/men-of-the-world we felt it unneccessary to mention that the builder, mechanical contractor, electrical contractor, various consultants and designers are all somehow related to the councillors, nevertheless the taxpayers can be assured that single-source quotations from these highly reputable firms are always “good value” to the taxpayers.

3
ivan
October 23, 2011 at 00:28

Does it really cost that much?
Yes, actually much more because politicians are involved and when they are spending other peoples money only the best their relations and companies can provide will do.

4
Simon Cooke
October 23, 2011 at 20:35

I have a secret – it can be done cheaply. Here’s a link (it will expire some point) showing what Kirklees do

http://connect.kirklees.public-i.tv/site/player/pl_v7.php?a=64078&t=0&m=wms&l=en_GB

5
SadButMadLad
October 24, 2011 at 09:22

Looks pretty good. And I bet it didn’t cost a quarter of a million.

6
ivan
October 24, 2011 at 11:51

There is a problem with that – I can’t see anything because it appears to be windows only! It is looking for windows media player or silverlight and ignores anything else that will play wmp files.

Because it suffers from vendor lockin I give it E for effort and say they could do a lot better if they used open standards.