« HouseLive.gov and the House Rules Committee Increase Transparency with Granicus »

The 112th U.S. Congress kicked off its first legislative session Wednesday in a live broadcast from the House floor reaching millions of viewers on Facebook and the Granicus network. This set the tone for what's to come in the new year from Congress—a stronger commitment to transparency and accountability.

Watch the 112th Congress convene for the first time here—all videos from the congressional floor are captured live, archived, and are searchable by the proceedings and the spoken word at HouseLive.gov using Granicus technologies.

The House Rules Committee is quickly following suit with increased transparency for their committee meetings. Under the new leadership of Congressman David Dreier, the committee made it a priority to adopt webcasting tools to become more transparent at the start of the 112th Congress. They are piloting the Granicus Open Platform to webcast their hearings and mark-ups live and on-demand. Check out the first webcast of the Rules Committee hearing here.

Federal agencies and committees need to minimize the time, costs, and complexity of webcasting their legislative sessions so they can stay focused on good governance instead of supporting technology. Having one provider for the technology, management, and 24/7 support ensures the content is secure, high quality, and available long-term for public access.

Here is a summary of some of modern video features Federal agencies and committees rely on to get their meetings to the Web with maximum quality, speed, and transparency through Granicus:

• Cross-platform compatible video players - Flash*, HTML5*, and Silverlight/WMP. 
• Powerful encoding and streaming formats - H.264 on-demand, Windows Media, and high quality video.
• Reach mobile devices - playback videos on mobile devices without requiring a plugin.
• Maximize transparency with rich video features - the new Digital Media Player delivers a rich user experience: ADA compliant closed captioning, indexing, document and records integration, searchable metadata, and more.
• Centralized web portal on your website - deliver a secure, one-stop-shop for all committee meetings on your website to help citizens stay engaged and informed in the most intuitive way possible. 
• Connect to blogs and the social grid -  entire videos or clips can easily be embedded on any website or social network.
• Authentic videos - people need to know they are getting information directly from the government source.
• Hosting and support - every video platform needs a powerful infrastructure that is backed by remote monitoring and multiple layers of redundancy to ensure security and reliability.

*Available for on-demand playback only