The increasing importance of video for the government sector

Video is increasingly being used by governments worldwide to improve engagement with citizens. According to research from SAP, 62% of citizens expect public service organizations to utilize innovative technologies and solutions. The same research says that 68% of governments cite improving the citizen experience as their number one priority.

In recent months, with governments often unable to engage in person, this has become increasingly important. However, many governments were already moving in this direction. While many people are interested in political decisions being made, most people simply don’t have time to, for example, attend parliamentary proceedings in person. Being able to watch live or view later is important for keeping up-to-date at your convenience.

At the same time, governments are challenged with ensuring they meet stringent compliance and accessibility regulations. Any video content must be easily accessible to anyone and always available. This means it needs to work on all screen types and sizes, work in all supported browsers, and be quick to load. It also requires the ability to add closed captions and / or subtitles, and in many countries, multilingual captions or subtitles are a requirement. Governments also need to carefully consider font size on the video or surrounding content, as well as lighting and colors to ensure clarity for viewers.

In Austria, the parliament consists of two chambers, The National and Federal Councils. Both are open to the public and the Austrian Parliament was keen to improve access to each chamber’s proceedings for citizens across the country. It turned to the ORS (Österreichische Rundfunksender GmbH & Co KG) to implement a cloud-based OTT solution.

The solution aimed to provide citizens with easy access to all parliamentary proceedings, including the ability to search through the archive for previous sittings. At the same time, it was important that the Austrian Parliament could scale quickly to ensure it could meet fluctuations in demand while keeping costs in check. Not being able to scale rapidly could lead to some people not being able to access the content or having a poor-quality feed.

ORS worked with Insys Video Technologies to implement the Insys Cloud Video Recorder, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is integrated with a number of AWS Media Services. Read the case study to find out how this cloud-based approach has made it simple for the Austrian Parliament to implement a secure and scalable channel while recording live sessions.