Athens City Council to upgrade livestreaming

Published 3:00 am Thursday, November 12, 2020

The onset of COVID-19 changed many facets of everyday life and left individuals and organizations alike to find ways to work around the pandemic.

For instance, the Athens City Council began livestreaming its meetings via Youtube so residents could continue to watch the proceedings without having to come to City Hall in person.

In order to solve the problem quickly, IT Director Dale Haymon was forced to use what equipment he had available. While the temporary setup did allow for the meetings to be shown, it was not done with professional equipment, with viewers complaining at times the lack of audio quality could leave speakers indecipherable.

Now that problem should be going away soon. The Council approved Haymon’s request on Monday to allocate $15,955 from capital funds not used during the 2019 fiscal year to purchase better equipment that will upgrade the livestream quality of the meetings.

“We are getting two cameras in here,” Haymon said. “They will be wall-mounted cameras, one in the front and one in the back. We are going to get a controller that lets us take the microphones and the camera feed and what’s from the (projector) screen so we can feed that to the stream as well.”

Haymon said the new equipment should make the livestream quality of the meetings more on par with a “professional level stream.”

Both Haymon and Mayor Ronnie Marks said the funds appropriated for this equipment should be eligible for reimbursement under the CARES Act.

“We had to learn how to do this as quickly as we could because of COVID,” Haymon said. “We have been doing this as best we can, and we realize this is something that’s going to be long term. We need to invest in getting this done, and with the CARES Act we will probably get reimbursed for it. This helps people be able to stay at home and not have to come up here.”

Haymon said there are many factors in how long it will take to get the new equipment, but he hopes to have the system installed by the end of the year.

The livestreams are shown on the City’s Youtube channel CityofAthensAla. Visit www.athensalabama.us/ for a link to the channel found at the top of the page.

Marks said he felt like upgrading the livestream quality of the meetings is important since coronavirus has not gone away as many had hoped, and the need to distance and mask remain.

“(Dale) has been using his personal phone to try and do this, and the quality has just not been there,” Marks said. “We are going to spend the money, and I thank the City Council for doing that. I think the quality will get better.”