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STATES OF JERSEY
STATES ASSEMBLY: STREAMING AND ONLINE ARCHIVE OF AUDIO
Lodged au Greffe on 14th July 2015
by Deputy J.A.N. Le Fondré of St. Lawrence
STATES GREFFE
2015 Price code: A P.74
PROPOSITION
THE STATES are asked to decide whether they are of opinion
- to agree that the audio recording of the proceedings of the States Assembly should be made available through the website of the States Assembly to enable users to listen again to the proceedings for a period of at least 6 months;
- to agree that a live audio feed of the proceedings of the States Assembly should be made available through the website of the States Assembly.
DEPUTY J.A.N. LE FONDRÉ OF ST. LAWRENCE
REPORT
This proposition is lodged purely to offer an alternative to the proposals suggested within P.39/2015 ("States Assembly: filming proceedings and the installation of clocks"), in respect of streaming the video proceedings of the States Assembly.
My principal concern with these proposals is that adoption of this proposition will, in my view, demonstrate a complete lack of recognition by the Assembly of the very serious financial pressures that we face. We are facing the prospect of compulsory redundancies, significant departmental spending cuts, and potentially a tax on the use of toilets (i.e. a sewage charge).
Yet on the same day that the Medium Term Financial Plan is now due to be lodged, we as an Assembly are being asked to spend between £22,000 – £30,000 each and every year filming ourselves.
This is a nice to have'.
It may be that members choose to reject both P.39/2015 and this proposition. However, for those members who believe that we do need to make some changes to the information we provide, then this is put forward as an alternative.
Namely, that rather than adopting video-streaming, we create the ability simply to replay the audio that we already produce (and which is used to produce Hansard).
That is part (a) of the proposition.
I am informed that the one-off capital cost of providing this would be in the order of £11,000 (detail provided under financial and manpower implications below). However, the ongoing revenue costs are significantly lower, at between £1,000 and £1,200 per year.
For completeness, part (b) of the proposition covers the ability to stream the audio live through the States Assembly website. This is already offered by some of the existing media, and accordingly this will be subject to a separate vote. It is a matter for members whether they consider this should be a service offered directly by the States, or whether we should continue to rely on the existing media to provide this service (at no cost to the taxpayer).
Financial and manpower implications
The implications depend on the technical solution adopted. The details below are for a more technically complicated method. If the technology already in place for Scrutiny podcasts were applied, it seems that the costs would be less.
Manpower implications
When compared to PPC's proposition, there would be no additional manpower implications arising as a result of this amendment. The States Greffe has indicated to PPC that it would absorb the staffing implications of web-streaming within existing manpower levels and there would be even less requirement for staff involvement if podcasts only were made available.
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P.74/2015
Financial implications
The financial implication for part (a) of the proposition is estimated as a maximum one-off cost of £11,000.
This covers the following –
- To provide a reasonably simple means for a non-technical member of the States Greffe staff to upload the audio files and initiate their conversion.
- To embed an audio playback component into the Hansard page on the www.statesassembly.gov.je site.
- To perform an automatic, dynamic check as to whether the cloud service has an audio file for each Hansard listed on the page, and if so, to display an icon and link that will enable the user to play back the audio.
- To modify links and titles for the Hansard page to reflect that it is now Hansard and audio.
- Configuration, code deployment, testing, project management and contingency.
If a decision were taken just to provide a podcast service similar to that already used by Scrutiny, the financial implications would be less.
The ongoing revenue cost of providing this service, namely to convert the audio files into the necessary format, store them, and the Internet bandwidth used in the playback of the audio, is estimated at £85 to £100 per month. This estimate is based on use of the Microsoft Azure cloud service.
No costs have been included for a dedicated Internet connection for the uploading of the audio files, as it is assumed that this will be done over the corporate Internet connection provided by Information Services.
The financial implication for part (b) of the proposition, namely live audio-streaming (web-based) is a one-off cost of £600. There does not appear to be any additional recurring cost for this service. It should be noted that this aspect is already provided by existing media.
The above statements have been provided by the States Greffe on the basis of their estimate of the impact of this proposition.
By way of comparison with the financial implications of P.39/2015, it is estimated that the ongoing revenue costs of that proposition are between £22,000 and £30,000 per year. Thus, overall, this proposition would represent a significant saving on the proposals of P.39/2015, whilst still representing an improvement on the service offered by the States of Jersey through its website.