Kelowna catching up with the rest of the world and will broadcast its own meetings

KELOWNA – While many other cities have in-house broadcasting programs for their council meetings with detailed archival systems, Kelowna city council has always relied on commercial broadcasters.

“It started out, as with most municipalities, with Shaw,” Deputy City Clerk Karen Needham told iNFOnews.ca. “It was mandated that they provide filming of the regular governments' goings-on and meetings.”

She didn’t know how long ago that was required as part of Shaw’s broadcast licence but the “old and outdated” equipment still being used to broadcast city council meetings belongs to Shaw, which is “moving away” from providing that service.

Most other municipalities live-stream their council meetings to the Internet.

Some years ago, Castanet started supplementing Shaw with audio coverage and, a couple of years ago, added a video feed, she said.

That means the regular Monday council meetings, held in council chambers, are broadcast live then rebroadcast later to Shaw subscribers.

Past meetings can be accessed through Castanet but it can take a couple of days before it's accessible and only provides one continuous audio recording so finding individual items can be challenging. There is no archived video.

Kelowna City Council budgeted $200,000 to be spent this year to upgrade its audiovisual system which will replace the existing carriers.

City Clerk Stephen Fleming said the new system will be similar to what’s offered in West Kelowna where achieved footage includes video and is indexed by agenda number, making access to specific items much simpler.

It’s expected the new system will be up and running this fall. It will only cover meetings in council chambers. Monday morning council meetings are held in a different room so will continue to not be broadcast.

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