CTV programming now archived

ARCHIVING CABLE ACCESS PROGRAMMING-Carolyn Johnson, standing, and Barri Worth from the Calabasas Media Department work on the city's new website archiving software.

For those who want to keep current on meetings of the Calabasas City Council or the Calabasas Planning Commission but can’t make the meetings, the city’s website now offers CTV programming archives where you can pull up any show, televised meeting or—more specifically—an individual agenda item covered in a televised meeting and watch it online.

Just this week, the city of Calabasas launched CTV program archives on its website, and all programming from this point on will be stored in the archive system, according to Calabasas Media Operations Director Deborah Steller.

"You can even search by topic," Steller said. "For example, if you went to (one of the previous council meetings) and typed in ‘civic center,’ the item will pop up, and you can link to the staff report, the agenda and the video of that agenda item taking place."

Steller said the city won’t go back and archive previous CTV programming.

"We’ve talked about going back, but part of the problem is that we have to play on the air what we need to archive at this point," Steller said. "We haven’t set it up technically to be able to play things offline and capture them for the archiving."

The archiving works best with computers that use a broadband connection. Slower computers and/or computers with dial-up connections might only produce audio.

Steller said the city’s technology department is working on ways to allow for viewing on most machines, even those with a dial-up connection.

To see the CTV archives, go to www.cityofcalabasas.com/ctvarchives.html.

You can web stream CTV at http://www.cityofcalabasas.com/ctv.html.

To learn more about watching videos on your computer, go to http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/video/faq.html#min_requirements to see a list of answers to frequently asked questions.

For general information about CTV, call the city at (818) 878-4225.

—Michael Picarella