We often come across procurements where they have merged the production of the city council with the distribution of the same. This is expensive and illogical management of two essentially different services, which can be better managed to save money.
Costly circumstances
For starters, the actual handling of the procurement costs a lot in the sense of time. It is not easy to write reasonable specifications that meet the needs without bias toward specific system features. Procurements also usually involve staff from several different departments, and we believe this is one of the reasons why many municipalities have only settled for Youtube. It is simply the path of “least resistance” as procurements can be perceived as both complicated and time-consuming.
Another costly circumstantial circumstance we see is un-optimal shall requirements. A shall requirement can be determined according to the functionality of a particular platform. Another platform may have a different solution, which makes the requirement unnecessary while precluding participation. The same thing can often be achieved in several different ways. Evaluating these functions and technical implications often requires high IT expertise. Writing accurate and objective requirements specifications is not a walk in the park.
The right supplier, producer or operating company?
We often receive requests to submit bids where video production is included. We don’t know much about video production and don’t deal with procuring production expertise. That would be costly. The same applies in reverse; it is rare to come across video producers who can operate data centers.
Nevertheless, this is the most common scenario, and often it leads to choosing a video producer and getting their choice of video platform without any say in the matter.
Streamio is a professional video platform for the city council. Streamio is run by Rackfish AB, an internet operator and operations specialist. Regarding camera technology and video production, there are of course other companies that are significantly better suited.
Problematic legal issues
We often see how producers have chosen to post videos from the city council on American services, such as Youtube, Vimeo and others. However, this poses a wide range of regulatory challenges if you are trying to comply with GDPR. How do you ensure, for example, that personal data is not moved to third countries outside the EU for advertising profiling when you post Youtube videos on your own website?
Here, some costs affect the customer directly and are never visible, but it entails work for lawyers and communicators. Of course, it is also a substantial financial risk considering the sanction fees that the Data Protection Authorities can impose if things go wrong.
Moving videos when changing provider
Procurement every three or four years inevitably means that you have to change the provider from time to time. One expense you might overlook in the calculation is the cost of changing the provider of video distribution. Videos should be moved, links should be changed, and accounts should be wiped. For this reason, it is wise to separate video production and video platform procurements.
Streamio’s solution
We offer a solution that is entirely price-leading, where even our most extensive plans are below the procurement limit of many authorities. You can often save 50-90% when you compare the contents of the plans with our competitors. We have over 20 years of experience in distributing video on the internet. We do it for large and small municipalities, regions and government agencies, large multinational companies, and small startups. Direct procurement of our Streamio plans tends to be more than enough to handle the city council and solve many of the problems above.
We at Streamio regularly do not participate in procurements because our services are priced at a completely different level than that of many of our colleagues. We have seen examples of customers who saved over 90% by using Streamio compared to other providers. A plan that covers the vast majority of municipalities or regions’ needs for city council streaming does not cost much on Streamio. However, we cannot keep these prices if, at the same time, we need to spend time on various procurements.
