Michigan State Senate

All new VOD with record time for meetings on demand available

Recently the Michigan State Senate decided to shop around as they were becoming more and more unhappy with their current streaming and playback vendor.  Also faced with a tight timeline as their current service was getting close to renewal and the Senate divided they wanted to move in a new direction.  After working with Advanced Lighting and Sound they were introduced to CASTUS and the many features that were available for a fraction of the cost and practically little to no learning curve.  After seeing many demos from multiple vendors and spending lots of time in discussion and comparison mode the final decision was made to move forward with CASTUS.  This decision was made for many reasons but at the end of the day CASTUS was the only vendor able to meet the requirements of an easy to use, scalable platform that’s streaming and video on demand was entirely cloud based.  The competitors just couldn’t meet the requirements.

When it comes to quality and turnaround time the Senate is very aware of what’s acceptable to their viewers.  Ensuring that the meetings were available for viewing moments after the meeting adjourned was a top priority for the Senate and CASTUS’ tech provided that.  Viewers required that the live meetings become available faster than what YouTube could provide which was under an hour after the meeting adjourned.  With CASTUS, their meetings are available minutes after they adjourn.  This allows the press to quickly and easily gain access to the video files without having to wait to request any added effort from the Senate.

The MI State Senate was informed that their existing library of over 1,500 videos would no longer be accessible to them unless they wanted to retrieve them individually and download each one by one.  Neither option was acceptable- losing access to their archives and having to do it manually was not realistic.  CASTUS came to the rescue by providing a migration option to move all existing archives to the new Cloud Platform and with that captured all the files, metadata, caption information and more.  All of this seemed like magic to the Senate when all of their files became available for viewing from the new platform and they didn;t have their library held hostage from them.  The Senate was able to decommission the previous vendor’s services and move forward soly with CASTUS.

“We recorded 7 meetings yesterday to the cloud and all of them uploaded to the website perfectly.”