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County’s Suite 1 streaming rollout faces hiccups; encoder hardware replacement planned
Summary
Dodge County IT reported intermittent failures in live streaming of board and committee meetings after moving off Vimeo to Suite 1; staff plan a hardware encoder replacement with vendor Lifeline and are using local recordings as a backup.
Dodge County IT told the IT Committee that the county’s move from Vimeo to Suite 1 for streaming board and committee meetings has produced mixed results: meetings are recording locally, but Suite 1 has intermittently failed to transmit live video to the website.
An IT staff member said the county clerk signed a contract with Suite 1 in December and the county needed to move off Vimeo by mid-June when the Vimeo license expired. “It’s recording to our encoder in the closet, so we’ll be able to recover the recording and post it. But right now, since it’s not streaming the website, Suite One’s not doing the recording for us,” the staff member said.
Why it matters: committee members said live streaming is an important transparency tool; relying on local recordings requires manual intervention and can delay public access. IT said its current Plan B is to post local recordings after meetings, but that approach is labor-intensive and undermines the goal of reliable live streaming.
Staff described troubleshooting limitations because Suite 1 is a cloud service and county staff have access only to an administrator portal, not the backend systems needed for deeper diagnostics. The committee was told that several meetings had recorded smoothly in recent weeks, but other sessions failed to stream.
The committee also discussed hardware in the county boardroom. IT has a signed agreement with vendor Lifeline to replace the encoder hardware in the boardroom; the staff member said the replacement should improve reliability. “We should have full reliability on Suite 1,” the staff member said, noting the county has experienced several recent failed streams before a successful board meeting recording.
Other CMS work: the county’s final content management system (CMS) site implementation is moving forward with the county’s web project manager, Megan Sheridan, and staff said the new site is scheduled to go live in October. The county currently maintains a Granicus site through the end of the year and staff said they will decide how long to run both systems in parallel to avoid duplicate content work.
The committee did not vote on switching vendors or purchasing additional streaming services but directed staff to continue troubleshooting, to rely on local backups in the short term, and to pursue the encoder replacement with Lifeline.
