Freese spoke to the council at its meeting April 14 and said the plan is for all meetings held in council chambers to be available on YouTube at some point. This would include Planning Commission and GSA meetings, as well as city council meetings.
"Anything that happens in here that's city of Ridgecrest related we will have it," he said.
Freese said viewers should simply search YouTube on City of Ridgecrest and have the option of subscribing to the channel to receive notifications when new content is uploaded.
At the request of the council, Freese said, he and the IT Department worked to enhance the ability of the public to view council meetings online and Freese reported back on their efforts at the most recent council meeting.
As in the past, meetings should be viewable on the city council website. The new feature is that they will also be viewable on YouTube. In what will likely be a huge improvement, the new videos have meeting topics timestamped to allow viewers to access specific topics easily.
In addition, the YouTube live feed will soon include a DVR feature allowing viewers to pause or look back at topics earlier in the same meeting. He demonstrated this feature live, projecting a picture of Councilwoman Lindsey Stephens taken a minute or two before. This led to great laughter in council chambers, especially from Stephens and Councilman Wallace Martin. Freese said this feature should be up and running by the next council meeting.
Another important enhancement is the addition of full closed captioning, including the ability to translate into a hundred languages.
"A disclaimer on that one, it is speech to text. So don't expect that to be a full transcription," Freese said. "It's pretty good but it's not going to be perfect."
The YouTube channel also has share features and sound control. Viewers can also control display resolution, which may be helpful in speeding up buffering on some machines.
Freese said the old video system's audio-only feed was seldom used, so it is being replaced with supporting documents such as presentations from the meeting.
The videos and live feed will also still be available for viewing via the council website. Freese said the videos will be viewable using a YouTube feature embedded in the city website.
Live council broadcasts are also available on Channel 6 Mediacom and Channel 41 (OTA Antenna).
Freese joked that the new features should make spending a weekend watching city council meetings easier.
"I know a lot of people that binge-watch," Martin said causing the crowd to laugh.
Council members thanked Freese effusively.
"Thank you. That's awesome. You enhanced it greatly and it didn't cost us anything," Stephens said.
"Bravo," said Martin.
Skip Gorman spoke up suggesting adding an interactive feature that would show a running thread of comments from viewers beneath the video.
"We thank you for a job well done," said Mayor Peggy Breeden.
The Daily Independent test-drove the new YouTube feature on April 24. On this day the council meeting for April 4 was available for viewing but the most recent meeting from April 18 did not appear to be available yet. For the April 4 meeting, the timestamp feature worked and did provide a much easier way to access specific segments of the meeting. The DI had difficulty accessing the most recent meeting on the city's website. On that day, however, there was a disclaimer that read, "The Media Vault is undergoing maintenance. Some videos may not be available during this maintenance period."
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