Granicus Boosts Civic Engagement With Live Streaming

Granicus manages the world’s largest and most reliable legislative content network—containing more than 5 million government media files and public records, and maintaining 99.98% uptime. To sustain and scale these numbers, Granicus relies on Wowza technology to power its live and on-demand video streaming. We’ll see how in this case study.

Case Study Snapshot

Industries
Government	Streaming service provider
Products/Services
Wowza Streaming Engine	Amazon S3
Use Case
Government; ongoing event/meeting broadcasts

Government Users Need Reliable Streaming at Scale

Granicus serves government users, who need video streaming with impeccable reliability and flexibility. As a result, Granicus needed to address the following challenges with its streaming solution:

• Significant number and length of weekly broadcasts—recording upwards of 1,500 hours of video per week.
• Demanding uptime requirements.
• Scalability for distribution within local networks, and to large audiences outside them.
• Easy implementation, without significant additional investments in infrastructure.

Granicus and Wowza Power Citizen Engagement

To address these challenges, Granicus chose Wowza Streaming Engine™ software. The resulting streaming solution enables convenient meeting management for government users, and helps boost civic engagement. Key elements include:

On-Premises Deployment With Scalable, Centralized Infrastructure

Granicus intelligently routes video streams based on geographic location; this minimizes latency for end users, and maximizes network efficiency to Wowza Streaming Engine servers. Viewers from within customer sites receive video from an on-premises Wowza Streaming Engine instance. Meanwhile, viewers outside of customer sites receive video from the Granicus system, which scales automatically via a content delivery network (CDN).

Built-In Transcoding

Granicus takes advantage of the live-stream transcoding feature in Wowza Streaming Engine software to produce adaptive-bitrate video streams. This gives viewers on any device, anywhere, the best possible viewing experience.

Cost-Savings

Using Wowza Streaming Engine software, Granicus was able to create a cost-effective solution for government users with limited budgets.

“Through our partnership with Wowza, our customers can increase citizens’ access to government, while boosting staff efficiency and controlling costs through automated online processes that can be managed at anytime, from any location.” —Javier Muniz, CTO at Granicus

Increased Speed to Market

With the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API and the Wowza Streaming Engine Java API, Wowza Streaming Engine users can create new capabilities quickly and easily. Granicus was able to go to market quickly with new features, including:

• Time-code generation, so customers can trim sections out of videos—complete with closed captioning and timestamps for when votes are taken during public meetings.
• Creation, viewing and sharing of customized viewer-traffic reports.
• Provisioning and deprovisioning of live, video-on-demand or proxy video streams easily, from anywhere with an internet connection.

Granicus Delivers High-Performance Streams to More Customers

Today, Granicus has over 63,000 government users who leverage the GranicusWowza integration. These customers use the solution to successfully handle their day-to-day government tasks, including webcasting public meetings, delivering legislative information, collaborating with citizens and more. The solution’s dependability has delivered many benefits to Granicus, such as:

Market Expansion

Building on the success of its self-service portal for legislative bodies, Granicus has expanded its reach. It now has customers in 15 business areas beyond the government sector.

Future-Proof Technology for Reliability and Added Value

Customers rely on Granicus to be at the forefront of webcasting. Every time Wowza implements industry-leading capabilities and significant new functionality, such as digital video recording or support for new formats and codecs, this translates directly into additional value Granicus can bring to its customers.

Professional-Quality Streaming

Regardless of audience size, available bandwidth or end-user devices, Granicus delivers the highest-quality live and on-demand video streaming with Wowza Streaming Engine.

“Working with Wowza gives us the tools to offer a video streaming solution that is cost-effective for government ,while being at the leading edge of the industry. With the system we built on Wowza technology, government agencies can connect with citizens in meaningful new ways online, over mobile devices or on social networks.” —Javier Muniz, CTO at Granicus