VERO BEACH – The City of Vero Beach hopes to start broadcasting its council meetings live on the Internet before the end of the year.
“It is breaking left and right,” Vero Beach City Clerk Tammy Vock said of the current recording system, which is 10 years old. The city approved allocating about $140,000 from its tourist tax fund to pay for the upgraded system.
Vock said that she has put off as long as she could asking the city for funds to replace the television recording and broadcasting system.
The plan had been to remove the old system and install the new during July, when the council was on break, but the equipment did not arrive in time, according to Vock.
Now, the city plans to wait until late December, when council is again on break for the holidays. Crews estimate that it could take about two weeks to switch out the equipment.
“It will be so much better,” Vock said of the video and audio quality of the broadcasts. It will also allow for residents and those living outside the city to watch Vero Beach City Council meetings live online instead of waiting for the video to be archived on the city’s Web site.
Councilmen Ken Daige and Brian Heady, both, have been vocal supporters of upgrading the city’s broadcasting equipment to allow for live Web casting.
Heady has asked that the future broadcasts of council meetings have a running timestamp along the bottom of the screen – like that of Indian River County’s meetings.
The timestamp would be a “valuable tool for research,” Heady said, explaining that anyone re-watching the meeting would be better able to find the moment they are looking for.
“We will be able to do that,” said Shane Dewitt, a representative of Audio Visual Innovations, the firm hired to perform the work.
The city’s old equipment, according to Dewitt, is mostly used for security purposes and some cameras could be repurposed for the Vero Beach Police Department or Public Works.
