Qualicum Beach town council wants the public to be able to view presentations that occur at council meetings while livestreaming at home.
At a Feb. 25 regular meeting, Coun. Teunis Westbroek made a motion that staff be instructed to review options for the council chamber live streaming to allow presentations to be aired on the live streams.
“Perhaps it can be a split screen or some other way that what’s being presented can also be online. I think people at home watching online are missing a lot,” Westbroek said.
At the March 18 council meeting, Town CAO Daniel Sailland said staff are looking at new technologies and that implementing the proposed action is a matter of timing and pricing.
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“As we add, not only in this room but around this building and around the community, we have projectors, high-definition cameras for security and all of those end up backing up onto the same server and the more we add the more it slows down,” Sailland said.
“So we’re paying attention to the timing and ultimately what we’d like to do is see this system move forward and time it with an update of our server system so we can actually have the bandwidth and storage capacity to do everything we want to do.”
Coun. Robert Filmer said there’s more improvements needed to the livestreams than just getting the presentations up.
“For all our viewers watching at home right now the quality is terrible to say the least,” Filmer said. “It’s not the greatest quality and the sound is not always there as well. I think if we were to look at a whole new program, do it in a phase so we’re not putting a huge cost into the chamber itself. Do it in a phase project—sounds, camera quality and the screens and whatever we need to do in this room.”
