The following article was written by Bob Kovacs and appeared in Government Video. Montgomery County uses Synergy Broadcast Automation to manage their content and automation.
In any county, there’s a need to serve the public with information on the activities of the local government.
by Bob Kovacs
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Just outside Washington, in sprawling and densely populated Montgomery County, Md., the Office of Cable and Communications team had to come up with a plan to feed simultaneous programs to different county population centers, using government channels on three local cable companies. As with so many questions in the past few years, the answer contained the words “the Internet.”
Jim Graham, chief engineer for the county’s Department of Technology Services, noted that the county wanted to reach out into the community.
“We have a mobile production van and looked for ways to get video live,” Graham said.
The traditional ways to get a live broadcast on the air (or onto cable channels) are all expensive and complicated. There’s microwave, which involves costly transmitters, receivers and towers, and there’s satellite, which involves expensive gear and pricey bandwidth-limited transponder time.
Graham and the television team at Montgomery County ruled both these out because of the cost and complexity. However, that still left a need to get live video from around the county back to the main control center, so that it could be fed to the appropriate cable company.
That’s where the Internet came in, in the form of the county’s own network that it calls “FiberNet.”
