Results
In their regular workflow, the City of Orem prefers to work with YouTube to save costs because a media server is not required. However, Monarch HD’s flexibility to work with several CDNs has saved the day for them in some difficult circumstances. On one such occasion, the day before a council meeting, the City of Orem’s building was struck by lightning that disabled a major part of their network equipment. While the city was scrambling to get the equipment back, Matrox technical support pitched in ably, provided connection to Ustream video streaming services as an alternative temporary workflow, and walked PrimeGov through the whole process. Consequently, the city was able to successfully stream and record the next day’s council meeting without hiccups.
While the webcasts are viewed by a good audience, video on demand is gaining popularity as residents are able to watch at their convenience. Additionally, the transparency these live streams and videos on demand afford is a huge benefit well appreciated by the residents.
Richard Drew, the CEO of Prime Government Solutions identifies several unique advantages to using Matrox Monarch HD. “The flawless integration lets us interact and remotely start and stop from our application. The ability to record while streaming comes in handy as onsite backup is paramount for a hosted solution such as ours. It has an incredibly fast start time compared to other solutions using standalone encoders or media services. And the flexible RTMP stream lets us push content to multiple CDNs.” He also appreciates how Monarch HD allows them to be expertise focussed; “Monarch HD is a life saver for us because it takes care of something that we’re not good at. We don’t do video at all. We make the calls to the Monarch HD through the API and it does everything video related for us.”