Webcast your public meetings from one tablet.
Audiominutes does audio webcasting and video webcasting for council meetings: it streams them live, transcribes them in real time as an optional add-on1, and publishes a searchable archive residents can use. It runs on a normal broadband connection.
Used by district, borough, county and parish councils: more than 6,200 meetings broadcast, more than 257,000 listener sessions, and 2,541 listeners on the busiest single day.
One person runs the whole thing
The clerk controls the meeting from a tablet, residents watch or listen in the browser, and everything lands in the portal for archiving.
The control app
Start, pause and resume the stream from a tablet or browser. Tag each agenda item with one tap as the meeting moves on.
The public player
Live and on-demand, with a jump-to menu so residents can skip straight to the item they care about.
The customer portal
Schedule meetings, upload agendas, manage the archive and pull links for your own website.
"I should say how impressed I was with the sound reproduction and clarity. The jump-to drop-down menu was so helpful also. Great job!"
Works with Modern.Gov and CMIS
Meetings and agenda items come across automatically from Civica's Modern.Gov or Astech's CMIS, so the agenda is ready to tag before the meeting starts, and the player sits on your own committee pages.
How a meeting runs
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1. Load the agenda
Paste or upload the agenda into the portal before the meeting, or let it come across from Modern.Gov or CMIS.
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2. Press start
One tap on the tablet opens the stream. Pause for exempt items and resume when you're ready.
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3. Tag each item
Mark each item as it begins. The live stream and the archive are indexed while the meeting is still running.
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4. Archive publishes itself
The recording appears on your site within minutes, indexed by agenda item, backed up and verified.
Most of our customers are councils
The service was built for local government and that is still where most of it runs, but nothing in it is council-specific. If you can plug in a microphone or a camera, you can broadcast whatever happens next.
Boards, trusts and AGMs
Housing associations, academy trusts, charities and co-operatives, where members have a right to see the meeting but cannot all be in the room.
Clubs and societies
Committee meetings, annual generals, talks and lectures. The same one-person setup as a council, at the same price a small organisation can approve.
And it need not be a meeting
Services, ceremonies, concerts, conference sessions, hustings, match commentary.
Pricing that a parish council can sign off
Audio webcasting, which some councils' reports call audio-casting, starts well below the cost of a video contract, and you can move up to video whenever you're ready. Audio Essentials is £1,140 a year for up to 12 audio webcasts, with extra ones at £45 each. Unlimited is £3,950 a year, with no cap on webcasts, in audio or video. Both have a one-off £250 set-up, and the plan prices are ex VAT.
"We piloted a video system several years ago but it proved too expensive to maintain. This system lets us keep the cost of improving accessibility very low."
1 Transcription is an add-on to either plan: £180 a year with Audio Essentials, £480 a year with Unlimited. Automatic speech recognition: a working record rather than a certified minute. Transcripts can be edited in the portal afterwards. ↩