Dear Brookline Community,
Our community relies on our ability to provide transparent, nonpartisan, and consistent coverage of community events and municipal meetings. To that end, over the past year, BIG has upgraded our media and IT equipment in town hall, the BHS auditorium, purchased a new broadcast server, and improved equipment at our offices in the Unified Arts Building. We’ve increased our capacity to have an unlimited number of viewers for our streamed events. We have also added staff coverage of two to three PTO meetings each month.
In recent weeks our cablecasting systems for the community cable channels, successfully tested prior to each meeting, failed intermittently on two occasions and had to be rebooted several times in order to restore access. In one instance, a complex system of audio and cabling were found rewired upon our entry to a facility just prior to a critical community meeting.
We have also heard one report that RCN and Comcast’s signals may have been disrupted, showing different versions of the same mtg. As the signal from BIG to the cable companies is the same feed, this should not have been the case. Consumers can call their cable company if they noticed discrepancies between the two providers. We can also send these complaints to the cable companies, but usually hearing directly from a customer is more effective.
Additionally, our streaming system is intermittently losing signal with its server, resulting in brief interruptions in our non-cable, streaming Internet connection between the live cable channels and YouTube. To meet even more increased community demand for the streaming of municipal content on our live cable channels, we are installing a high-end, live streaming solution and expect it to be operational shortly.
Thank you for your patience. Technology does sometimes fail without warning or reason, and our team of dedicated staff is always watching, troubleshooting, answering calls, and rebooting systems as needed throughout our community, school and government meeting live coverage.
Please visit our Town Select Board coverage page here, and we hope you’ll come into BIG to create your own media in 2018!
Sincerely,
Kathy Bisbee
Executive Director, Brookline Interactive Group (BIG)