Just before leaving Ann Arbor last fall, I attempted to make contact with someone at the local cable access station (CTN) regarding two issues surrounding their broadcast of government meetings.

The first was regarding whether they could improve their TV listings so it would be easier to record meetings on their DVRs. I would regularly manual program my Tivo to capture City Council meetings and Lizz would record Parks meetings. It would have been much easier if CTN listings were available in the TV listings so we could have just scheduled “Season Passes” or at least had a one-click “record this.” Have they fixed this yet?

The second was regarding the copyright on those meeting broadcasts. I was planning to put together a DVR based on MythTV specifically to record and encode government meetings to be posted to the web for viewing by those who don’t have cable televsion. Since bandwidth gets expensive for video, I was hoping to secure some sort of copyright permission (which seems reasonable for a publicly funded recording of an open, public meeting) so that I could store the recordings on archive.org or Google Video.

If anyone is interested in picking up either one of these projects, I am happy to assist. I am specifically interested in the creative opportunities to make things like City Council meetings actually interesting. Remember Pop Up Video on VH1? Imagine “Pop Up City Council.” That’s one of many fun and funny things that could be done with this raw material.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Geekery, Media, Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.