Experience with Granicus?

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joegml's picture

Anybody have any experience with Granicus? http://www.granicus.com/Streaming-Media-Government.aspx

Can a Drupal based system compete w/ Granicus' economies of scale? Is a Granicus system a good fit for a Public Access station in a small town of 9000 people? Any real life experience stories welcomed.

Thank you.

Comments

It's hard to tell without

kreynen's picture

It's hard to tell without some numbers. Do you have a ballpark for what Granicus runs?

Is this for streaming or is there an archive as well?

Have you looked at UStream (http://www.ustream.tv)?

through the grapevine

jdcreativity's picture

I have heard that Granicus costs an arm and leg, this was a town roughly double what you suggested. They decided against it.

Interesting ...

joegml's picture

Yeah, my research is kind of of agreeing with that. They quoted a pretty low price on a job here in VT that seems out of line with other quotes of theirs I've seen.

Aside from price, do they do a good job? It seems they're kind of tight with Microsoft (see http://www2.granicus.com/dga/catagories.html). They also run Silverlight (Microsoft) for their streaming. Any tech comments on (de)merits of Silverlight?

Thanx all.

Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections

Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections

would love to see an alternative

eisenmen-gdo's picture

The county here uses it - to host a rather minimal amount of video at quite a large cost. Given the small number of views, I just can't see this as being a cost effective solution. Granicus does well at making it easy for city clerks to post minutes which then are linked to program chapters in the video. The problem is that it uses WM and doesn't play well with browsers other than IE on Macs.

I would love to see a flash based solution developed - it really can't be that hard to make media chapters play with html anchors. And if that's not possible, it's really just having a front end that's easy for clerks to use to post the minutes and media. This would be an important fee for service revenue stream for PEG centers - and is worth putting some effort into.

Michael

Try EarthChannel

mashby's picture

For government streaming, be sure the check out EarthChannel (http://earthchannel.com). They run about half the price of what Granicus and have the same suite of services and are easier to use. Full disclosure: I work for EarthChannel.

Both companies provide an end-to-end streaming solution, so integration is relative. For example, you can integrate the OnDemand archives, but when the viewer plays the video itself, that player typically resides on their respective servers. That being said, with EarthChannel, you can integrate the search, archives and live stream through embedding iFrames and it makes managing the OnDemand content a snap for those in the production department. If you're looking to create individual articles for each meeting, you can do that too, but it would involve a little more work (aka copy and paste)

@eisenmen - regarding the Windows Media format versus Flash: in my experience, I've found that WMV is much more scalable and efficient in terms of quality and low bitrate than Flash. You can make Flash encoded video look good, but it takes more bandwidth and resources. Silverlight works really, really well. In fact, I was surprised that Microsoft wrote it!

Silverlight works with Windows, Mac and now Linux through Moonlight (http://mono-project.com/Moonlight) and has been very well received. In fact that's what Netflix uses for it's streaming solution.

A good example of what the end result looks like, check out Yuma 77 Online (http://yuma77.tv/). Their "Live" and "V.O.D" services are provided by EarthChannel and fully integrated into their site.

Anyway, like I said, I work for EarthChannel so I do have a bias, but I also have a passion for PEG content and love to see municipalities succeed in adding transparency through media -- regardless of the provider that they use.

Hope that helps!

We're exploring this

deproduction's picture

SNCAT in Reno has developed solutions that could be considered Granicus competitors. Reno's solution is promoted in their region as a direct competitor, developed in Flash, and is impressive, but isn't open-source. THey're very supportive of its use in other access stations, so its worth exploring.

From what I've seen, your clickable agenda solution at CCTV's is an important piece of the puzzle.
We can likely start supporting development of a Drupal-based solution late this summer or next, for our work with the new Colorado Channel.

Tony

Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second, because without change in the media, the chances of progress in your primary area are far less likely. http://denveropenmedia.org

Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second, because without change in the media, the chances of progress in your primary area are far less likely. http://denveropenmedia.org

Indexing = Clickable Agenda

mashby's picture

@Tony

Good links. I love seeing how other people are doing things and delivering video over the web. The Denver Open Media site is especially impressive.

Regarding your comment on "clickable agenda solution". That's really the difference between delivering short vs. long form media over the web. For short form media, the content can be classified by a simple title and description. For long form media, you really need to index the content to provide more meta data in which to search on. Without Indexing the media, it's just one long blob of content.

For governmental programming, being able to take your agenda and apply it to your video with timecode or off-sets allows you to add a lot of rich content (meta data, attachments, links, etc) and provide real transparency to the government process. The only method I've seen out there for doing this is in 3rd party solutions, like EarthChannel.

I know that Adobe is working on this as an end-to-end solution, but unless you stay in the Adobe world from start to finish, you'll break the chain. They do, however, see this as the future of long-form video (http://www.beet.tv/2008/04/ndexing-is-key.html)

Do you think there could be a Drupal module that would provide this level of indexing?

Followup Granicus killers

eisenmen-gdo's picture

Ran across this the other day, an Adobe rep discussing Flash integration of media indexing for video:

"Video Indexing is Key to the Future of the Web," Chief Adobe Strategist Mark Randall
http://www.beet.tv/2008/04/ndexing-is-key.html

And from the comments to that - another third party solution:

MediaCloud
http://www.everyzing.com/solutions/mediacloud

An explanation

javiermuniz's picture

Hi Guys,

First, I apologize for reviving a year old thread, but as a founder of the company I felt the need to explain some things about Granicus.

First, on the cost, the cost is variable based on the feature set and population, not usage. So if you are just looking to do video streaming, you will get a very different price from a jurisdiction that gets a solution that includes ECM, Voting, Minutes, Training, Citizen Participation tools, etc. However, if you post 1 video you won't be charged any less than if you post 50, or 50,000. The cost is fixed, and there is no branding, ads, or gimmicks. If you do an honest comparison, I think you'll find that we are extremely competitively priced.

That leads me to the value. When we started Granicus, our goal was for people to use the tool as much as possible, that's why we chose the pricing model that we did. We encourage our customers to produce more video and get more hits by actively promoting our customers video and publicly posting a "scoreboard" of top producers on our website. We even made an open API so that others could build solutions for uploading more content and driving more usage. There are of course people that underutilize their solution, but we do everything we can to prevent those situations. In the end, the value you get from a Granicus solution is up to you, the customer.

As far as us being a Microsoft shop, that's only partially true. We are a blend of .NET and PHP (use the tool that fits the job), and run a MySQL backend. My background is as a Linux geek, and I own a Mac as my only computer. We use Silverlight today because back in 2001 the choice was between Real and Windows Media... and let's just say it's possible to be more evil than Microsoft. Flash and HTML5 are big priorities for us, and right around the corner at this point... but transcoding almost a million video files does take some time. :)

As far as producing a Drupal module, it would be possible for indexing, but probably not meeting management. Our meeting management solutions are built on a custom event-driven communication platform that offers extremely low latency. This is needed because when a clerk is running a meeting they can't be held up waiting for a page to load. 1 second response times in our world are considered slow. Our first version was actually powered by a pretty lightweight LAMP stack, and we got tons of complaints about performance. Some of the new websocket-based frameworks might be sufficient in performance, but we haven't done any real testing on those at this point.

If you are seriously looking at streaming, I'd urge to you at least talk to us. I realize our solution isn't for everyone. If you've given us an honest look and decide to go it alone, I will happily provide advice and help in producing a solution for yourself or for the open source community. We don't do anything magical or amazing at Granicus. We are just a group of passionate people that are dedicated to the cause of increasing government transparency and efficiency, and happen to love video.

Hope that clears some things up. :)

Javier Muniz
CTO, Granicus

Thanks for providing your

civicpixel's picture

Thanks for providing your input to this thread Javier. I work with the Open Media Foundation here in Denver and we just launched a new website for the Colorado Channel, who is using Granicus for streaming and indexing. You mentioned an API in your post, I googled and filled out the API request form as I would love to be able to build tighter integration between their site and video library / agendas / etc. The iframes are a bit clunky. Depending on what the API offers, we'll take any work we do and put it in a module for anyone else interested.

I'm also very interested in any updates regarding the Flash / HTML5 possibilities you mentioned.

Sent you the API!

javiermuniz's picture

Yup, received your API request and provided all the info. Thanks! I agree the iframes are a mess, and we're working on another solution for customers that want to integrate programatically. As Drupal gains more ground (house.gov apparently is moving towards Drupal!) I'm sure that we'll see more and more interest from the community to integrate our APIs within Drupal, and while I'm not a Drupal developer myself I intend to give as much support as possible to the community to build these integrations and make them successful.

Sent you an email about Flash/HTML5. The short answer is it's coming soon. I can't say more than that in a public forum just yet unfortunately.