Nebraska Capitol Live Mobile App

Transcription

1 2013 NASCIO Recognition Submission Nebraska Capitol Live Mobile App Category: Fast Track Solutions Stacey Decker Assistant General Manager/Chief Technology Officer Shane Miner Project Manager Mike Fields Lead Developer Nebraska Educational Telecommunications 1800 North 33 rd Street Lincoln, Nebraska Phone: (402) State of Nebraska Project Initiation: October 2012 Project Completion: February 2013

2 Executive Summary Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET), a collection of Nebraska s educational television and radio stations, has assembled a robust content management system to gather, manage, and deliver rich media to the citizens of Nebraska. Over the last five years this system has been responsible for streaming gavel to gavel coverage of the Nebraska State Legislature, the Nebraska Department of Education, the Supreme and Appellate Courts, as well as a number of other State entities. Some of this coverage is available on the NET2 channel on cable television, but all of the coverage is streamed and available on the NET website live. This content is cataloged and made available to create the public record (transcript) of the sessions. This system provides the opportunity for citizens to have unprecedented access to their government, as well as advantage a wide range of technologies to ensure that content is created and delivered in as cost effective a manner as possible. For example, one production employee is responsible for creating over 3,000 hours of that streaming and television content each year. This effort is closely tied to the Governor and Legislature s desire to promote transparency in government. In April of 2010 the state of Nebraska passed, and Governor Heineman signed, a law promoting transparency in state government. "For democracy to prosper, government must to be accountable to the people it represents," said Gov. Heineman. "As public officials, we are accountable to our citizens and maintaining clear communication with Nebraskans should play a central role in everything we do. LB 742 promotes transparency and I commend Sen. McCoy for his work on this important legislation." This streaming effort has allowed unprecedented access for Nebraska citizens to their legislature. In recent years, with the growth and availability of mobile technology, we have seen a significant spike in the mobile traffic to our website. We were very excited to offer the citizens of Nebraska significant access to their government, but soon realized that with our lack of mobile friendly applications, we were slowly losing ground to the changing tide of traffic. In order to address the increased need and desire for citizens with mobile devices to access streaming coverage, we began a process to convert our streaming engine and transcoding software to be compatible with newer Android and all ios devices. NET then began creating a mobile application that would allow users direct access to all of our streaming content, and finally started offering the content on our website in a mobile friendly manner. With the updated streaming engines and new transcoding software, we are seeing a solid amount of traffic on our website with mobile devices. The applications have seen a relatively quick adoption with almost 400 downloads in just three months. The mobile friendly model is allowing the citizens of Nebraska instant access to open government where ever they are and whenever they want. NET is glad to be able to quickly address the changing needs of our citizens and to continue to provide them with the resources they want on the platforms they expect to use.

3 2013 Nebraska Capitol Live Application NASCIO Award Submission Fast Track Solutions Problem Take a look around on any bus or subway, in any airport, or even around the conference table at work and you are bound to see that a number of individuals are glued to their smartphones or tablets. It s no secret that more and more people own smartphones but just how many? According to comscore s latest report on the U.S. Smartphone market, million people owned smartphones as of February That s up eight percent from November Over half of U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the Web through a smartphone or tablet and as providers improve their networks for better speed and continue to push out new devices with different data packages, customers are browsing the Web more and more from their smartphones or tablets than from traditional desktop computers. According to a survey released by Pew Research Center s Project for Excellence in Journalism, nearly two-thirds of smartphone and tablet owners read or view news at least weekly on their device. One-third of smartphone and tablet owners visit a local, state or federal government website at least weekly, and six percent visit any of these sites on a typical day. Mobile devices are also increasing the amount of news people receive, as almost a third of tablet users stated they view news on their tablet from sources they didn t see in other platforms such as print or desktop. Currently, 40% more users prefer to receive news through browsers, rather than apps, on their smartphone or tablet. However, the percentage of people who get their news mostly through apps is growing, now at 23%, likely because news apps are becoming more readily available without having to pay for content. While all this streaming content is online, our previous configuration was unable to stream these videos to mobile devices. The system prior to this project used a large hardware array of streaming engines to encode and transcode the content for delivery to a content delivery network (CDN), which then retransmitted that content to all of our users. These engines all created Flash video based streams, and our CDN was configured with Flash in mind which is not compatible with new Android devices as well as all ios (Apple) devices. Adobe discontinued Flash development for mobile devices in November 2011 and, ever since the first iphone, Apple has not supported Flash as it had poor

4 performance on mobile devices and raised a number of security issues. This means that none of our streams were viewable on newer Android phones or any Apple tablet or smartphone. As of February 2013 Apple ranked as the top original equipment manufacturer (OEM) at 38.9%, followed by Samsung at 21.3% and HTC, Motorola, and LG at 9.3%, 8.4%, and 6.8% respectively. In February 2013 Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform at 51.7%, Apple at 38.9%, followed by BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Symbian at 5.4%, 3.2%, and.5% respectively. With this information it was apparent we were alienating a large part of our market by simply not having compatible software with the devices being used. Keeping this in mind we needed to find a way to address the Nebraska citizens changing needs and preferences. NET simply needed to find a better solution to transcode our content to make it easier for citizens to view on all devices they expect to use. Solution In October of 2012, we began the process of redesigning the technology used to stream our content in order to address the increased need and desire for citizens with mobile devices to access the streams. Our team began looking for better ways to stream video and other media across all devices that all had different bandwidth capabilities. Our next step was altering settings on the large hardware array of streaming engines that encoded and transcoded the content for delivery to a CDN that then retransmitted the content to our users. Since our CDN was configured with Flash, we looked into different platforms that would use a simple encoding method and then send the content to a new server with the new transcoding software, Wowza. Wowza is a video and media streaming platform that offers live and on-demand streaming compatible with PCs and Macs as well as iphone, ipad, Android, and other smartphones and tablets. With Wowza we were able to create two different video files, as well as three different bandwidths for a total of six streams. Wowza gave us the ability to offer a high quality, low quality, and audio only stream in both Flash and HLS or HTTP Live Streaming. Flash streams can be easily viewed on PCs and older mobile devices and HLS or HTTP Live Streaming is based off of the media streaming communications protocol implemented by Apple. This allows us to now stream all of our content to any desktop or mobile device. During the implementation of this new encoding software, we also wanted to produce a mobile application that would allow users to stream our live government

5 content without using the browser on their device. On demand video is widely available in applications; the complexity of live video presented a number of challenges throughout the process. We wanted to try and deliver this mobile application in conjunction with the start of a new legislative session. Given our limited staffing, we needed to use a local company to begin development on the ios version of the application. Our team worked closely with Nebraska Global, a venture capital fund based in Lincoln, Nebraska, to create the ios application. Adjustments to that system were completed fairly quickly (January 2013). We then started on the Android version of the application which was built completely inhouse. Both apps were completed around the same time and released into the various markets in mid-february of 2013 (2/19/13 for the itunes App Store and 2/22/13 for Google Play) ( Significance Live and on-demand streaming provides Nebraska citizens with minute to minute updates and news. With free access, citizens are able to stay current on all the workings of the Nebraska Legislature. With the growth and momentum of digital-only listening and the rapid increase in the use of cellphones in the car to listen to online radio, we are able to connect with our citizens on the road, in the home, or at work with our audio only streams. Taking advantage of mobile Web access is giving us the opportunity to be with our citizens where ever they are. We are glad to be able to quickly address the needs of the citizens of Nebraska and to continue to provide them instant access to open government on all of the new platforms they expect to use. Currently, NET sees between 10-40% of our website streaming coming from mobile platforms. Since the software update, our website has played 157,772 video or audio files for a total of 4,585,666 minutes. On average each user watches/listens for at least 29 minutes. The mobile friendly website/versions of our streams have seen approximately 20,055 stream requests for a total of 159,518 minutes, each stream request averaging eight minutes.

6 Benefits Currently Nebraska citizens can access their government at any time from any computer or smart phone with an internet connection. Over the years this system has evolved from a weekly television show in 1955 called Your Unicameral to a complete gavel to gavel coverage in the digital age. This unprecedented access was recognized through a resolution by Speaker of the House, Mike Flood, in April 2012 for NET s, long history of legislative coverage and for its efforts to keep Nebraskans informed and connected to their Legislature. Before implementing the new software platform the State of Nebraska was spending a significant amount of money on the previous systems hardware costs, maintenance, and time. The new streaming platform has provided the citizens of Nebraska with more efficient ways to view and receive state news. This new streaming platform is also more cost-effective and more efficient to update as technology quickly advances. The return on investment is immediate and the equipment is expected to last for the next 5-10 years. This new technology is a dramatic difference that helps put Nebraska on the map as a leader in the technological field. It is estimated that having live and on-demand streams has already saved $42,000 based off of the cost of previous distribution methods. The benefits of the project go beyond financial profit and straight to the citizens of Nebraska. These new applications and updated services provide them with easy access and readily available information about their government, giving them more security and knowledge about the workings of the State of Nebraska government.