Council & NHS Meeting Webcasting | Public Sector | dwmedia

Public sector meeting webcasting by dwmedia
Public Sector

Meetings held in public,
actually seen in public.

The duty says open to the public. The webcast is what makes that mean something.

Live streaming and webcasting for council committees, NHS trust boards, combined authorities and public consultations. Accessible, archived, and produced to a standard that survives scrutiny.

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Nobody attends
a meeting held
in a committee room.

A public body can satisfy the letter of an openness duty with six chairs in a corridor and a notice on a noticeboard. Technically the meeting was held in public. In practice three people came, two of them were journalists, and nobody else knew it happened.

Webcasting changes the arithmetic. The same meeting reaches hundreds of residents, staff, campaigners and reporters, and it stays available afterwards for anyone who wants to check what was actually said rather than what the minutes summarised.

That is a higher bar than it sounds, because a meeting that is genuinely open has to be watchable, audible, accessible and permanently retrievable. Most of the problems we get called in to fix are one of those four.

Webcasting for councils, trusts and combined authorities.

dwmedia provides live streaming and meeting webcasting for local authorities, NHS trusts and foundation trusts, combined authorities, fire and police governance bodies, and other public organisations across the UK. The work covers full council and cabinet meetings, scrutiny and licensing committees, planning committees, boards held in public, annual general meetings and public consultation events.

What makes this different from conference streaming is that the output is a public record. It will be watched by residents, referenced by journalists, quoted by campaigners and occasionally examined in a complaint or an appeal. So the production has to prioritise the unglamorous things: every speaker clearly audible, every name identified, every paper legible on screen, and an archive that is complete rather than edited.

Accessibility is a statutory question here, not a preference

Public sector bodies sit under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations for their websites and the content published on them, alongside the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty. The British Sign Language Act 2022 adds reporting duties for government departments on their use of BSL. Live streams get a partial exemption while they are genuinely live, but that exemption expires: once a recording has been published for more than fourteen days it is treated as pre-recorded content and needs accurate captions. Since meeting archives are typically retained for years, an uncaptioned archive is a compliance problem that compounds quietly. We deliver captioned recordings as part of the job rather than as a change request. Detail on our accessible streaming page.

Procurement, insurance and the paperwork

Public bodies buy differently. We are used to supplying public liability and employers’ liability certificates, method statements and risk assessments before anyone asks, working to a purchase order, and providing the documentation your procurement team needs without a chase. For work under threshold that usually means a straightforward quote and PO. For larger or framework-based procurement we can respond to a specification, and we will tell you plainly if a requirement is outside what we can deliver rather than bidding on it and hoping.

Some suppliers in this space install fixed chamber systems and leave you to operate them, which works until the day it does not and there is nobody in the building who knows why. We bring operators, we bring our own bonded connectivity rather than relying on the building’s network, and we test everything before the meeting opens. See also hybrid events and live production. dwmedia works UK-wide from Ashington, Northumberland.

What we do

A record that
stands up.

Committee meeting multi-camera coverage
01
Every speaker, identified
Chair, members, officers and public speakers covered and named on screen. A viewer at home can follow who said what without cross-referencing an attendance list.
Accessible captioned public meeting stream
02
Compliant from day one
Live captions, BSL where required, and a captioned archive delivered ready to publish. No fourteen day cliff edge waiting to be discovered.
Meeting archive and chaptered recording
03
A usable archive
Recordings chaptered by agenda item so residents and journalists can jump to the item they care about instead of scrubbing through four hours.
Public sector webcasting production
What we bring

Specified for a chamber,
not a stage.

Committee rooms are awkward rooms. Long tables, bad acoustics, fluorescent lighting and people who turn away from the microphone. That is what we build for.

Multi-camera chamber coverage
Chair, members and public speaking positions. Cut live so the viewer is always looking at whoever is talking.
Papers and presentations on screen
Reports, plans and slides cut into the broadcast at readable size. Planning committees in particular are unfollowable without this.
Audio from the room system
Direct feed from your microphone system where one exists, supplemented where it does not. Inaudible public speakers are the most common complaint about council webcasts.
Independent connectivity
Bonded cellular rather than the corporate network, which avoids both the bandwidth question and a conversation with your IT security team.
Exempt item handling
Clean stop and restart around confidential business, with the archive assembled so the public part is continuous and the exempt part was never broadcast.
Compliance paperwork upfront
Public liability, employers’ liability, RAMS and risk assessments provided with the quote rather than after three emails.
FAQs

Common questions.

No, and it is worth being clear about the difference. Some suppliers fit permanent cameras into a council chamber and hand you a control panel. That suits a body webcasting weekly from one room. We are a crewed production company, which suits bodies webcasting a smaller number of higher-stakes meetings, meeting in different venues, or wanting a production standard a fixed system will not reach. If a fixed install is genuinely what you need, we will say so.
We plan it with your governance officer beforehand. The stream stops cleanly before the exempt item, the recording does not capture it, and we restart for any public business afterwards. The archive is assembled so the public portions are continuous. It is a rehearsed part of the running order rather than something improvised when the chair announces it.
Once they have been published for more than fourteen days, they are treated as pre-recorded content rather than live, which brings them under the accessibility standard requiring accurate captions. Meeting archives are usually retained far longer than fourteen days, so in practice yes. We deliver the captioned version as part of the job. This is background rather than legal advice and worth confirming with your own compliance team.
Yes. We supply insurance certificates, method statements and risk assessments as standard, work to purchase orders, and can respond to a written specification. We are a small owner-led company with a freelance crew network, which we say upfront because it matters for some frameworks. If a requirement is genuinely outside what we can deliver we will tell you rather than bid and find out later.
We would rather not, and most IT teams prefer it that way too. We bring bonded cellular connectivity, which means no firewall exceptions, no bandwidth negotiation and no conversation about plugging unfamiliar equipment into the corporate network. It also means the webcast is unaffected if the building’s line has a bad afternoon.
It depends on meeting length, room size, camera count, accessibility requirements and whether it is a one-off or a recurring commitment. Recurring meetings cost noticeably less per session because the setup becomes known and repeatable. We quote against your actual meeting schedule rather than a per-hour rate card, so a short call is the quickest route to a real number.
Get started

Meetings to
webcast?

Tell us the meeting schedule, the room and the accessibility requirement. We will come back with a plan and a quote.

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