In addition to being broadcast live on Channel 6, meetings will be available on-demand, just as City Council meetings have been since January. Keith Reeves, manager of Channel 6, said, "making council meetings available on-demand has been popular with the public and that expanding the program was the next logical step."

The work involved just to make council meetings available on-demand was time-consuming for the city’s Web team. So when the city decided to expand its online offerings, it contracted with a Plano, Texas based company called Swagit Productions, LLC, to provide video on-demand service for nearly two-dozen different public meetings.

"We've got an opportunity to extend the availability of all of these dialogues to the public," said Doug Matthews, the city's chief communications director. "That's our primary objective. But the other objective is to make sure we're utilizing the right resources, and in this case not only do we have an opportunity to extend that reach, but we can do it with a company that specializes in this."

Swagit provides video on-demand services for municipalities nationwide, and its Texas clients include Irving, Plano and Houston. Austin's new service will make more public meetings available on-demand than any other city in the U.S.

Video footage of meetings will automatically be uploaded to Swagit's servers and meetings will be broken down by agenda item, so that viewers can either watch the entire meeting or select a particular agenda item from an on-screen menu. "Swagit's solution creates no additional work for city staff," said Reeves. "It offers the city a truly hands-free, fully automated system for streaming video live and on-demand."

"This gets us out of the streaming video business and it leverages those resources to enhance the product," Matthews said. "Right now we've got council meetings available, but because we've constructed this in-house, when we have a council meeting it might be several days before that meeting is available online. So this compresses the timeline so that within a few hours people will be able to view those meetings online."