Austrian Parliament TV Delivering Proceedings to the Public

The Austrian Parliament places a great deal of importance on engagement with citizens, as all parliamentary sittings are open to the public. The Parliament had introduced a live streaming platform in 2019, allowing interested citizens to access proceedings without having to attend in person. However, it was looking to improve the platform with a secure, scalable, and cloud-based infrastructure. The Austrian Parliament worked with ORS (Österreichische Rundfunksender GmbH & Co KG) and Insys Video Technologies (VT) to launch an OTT platform for parliamentary sessions.

As a government entity, the Austrian Parliament needed to not only make the live proceedings available for the public, but also enable all videos to be stored and viewed at a later stage by any interested party. At the same time, security is naturally a key concern for the parliament, so any solution must be designed to keep content safe.

It was also clear that some sessions attract a bigger audience than others. Being able to quickly and easily scale the service to allow for varying viewer numbers was therefore an important consideration.

Thanks to its specialist knowledge of the video landscape across the country, ORS was selected by the Austrian Parliament to implement a cloud-based solution. ORS works with video content providers to distribute audio-visual offerings via multiple networks, including terrestrial, satellite, and cable, as well as IP and streaming services. ORS chose Insys Video Technologies for this project to implement the Insys Cloud Video Recorder, which runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is integrated with a number of AWS Media Services.

Interested citizens are able to follow live video streams across several channels for parliamentary sessions, live events, press conferences, and committees. Insys Cloud Video Recorder also records these live streams, adds appropriate metadata, and stores them in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). These recordings can be easily downloaded, as well as streamed on-demand via the web player.

An integrated editing tool allows the Parliament, as well as the editing team, to manually adjust timestamps and create new video clips from the material as well as editable image overlay inserts. A specialized web player enables users to choose to view a selected speaker by clicking the appropriate tag.

Insys Cloud Video Recorder is a complete and flexible solution for recording and storing live video channels in the cloud. Designed specifically for public sector video applications, it simplifies the process for recording virtually unlimited live video streams, storing them in the cloud, and distributing them to nearly any video playback device. The Austrian Parliament is able to analyze and catalog the recordings and stream the content wherever and whenever viewers want.

The Austrian Parliament was keen to adopt a cloud-based approach to give it flexibility and scalability. At the same time, it was important that video would be reliably and automatically recorded and delivered to ensure that no proceedings would be missed. Integrations with AWS Media Services ensure that the videos can be quickly and easily prepared, processed, and delivered.

Services used include AWS Elemental MediaLive for live video encoding, AWS Elemental MediaPackage for video packaging and delivery, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert for file-based video transcoding.

Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, video content is delivered securely with low latency and high transfer speeds. All videos are seamlessly and automatically recorded and stored within Amazon S3. As well as storing and protecting the video files, easy-to-use management features mean that the Austrian Parliament can easily organize those videos and configure finely tuned access controls.

Michael Wagenhofer, CEO of ORS, commented, “Insys Cloud Video Recorder, together with Amazon Web Services, makes it simple to implement a secure and scalable channel while recording live sessions, something that is particularly important for government entities. Ultimately, the result is easy access for Austrian citizens to the inner workings of the Austrian Parliament, an area we feel passionately about. The proverbial cherry on the cake of this project is the integrated editing tool that rounds off this state of the art Live2VOD Cloud solution.”