North Metro Television is a local cable channel that provides information and broadcasts on city government, local sports, and community activities for the northern Twin Cities suburban cities of Blaine, Centerville, Circle Pines, Ham Lake, Lexington, Lino Lakes, and Spring Lake Park. North Metro staff wanted to redesign their website to start online broadcasting and streaming, using their current broadcasting system to serve as a streaming service for the community. The new site needed to offer video on demand files and livestream, as well as a bookmarking service for community meetings to allow viewers to browse through important topics and skip right to the place in the video they wanted – with a click.

North Metro TV reached out to the BizzyWeb team create a website that could offer the programming they desired and integrate with their broadcasting system to deliver a seamless website for streaming video, video on demand, as well as giving a great user experience to local users. One of the major challenges was creating a custom video bookmarking plugin for local community meetings to upload their videos and have them bookmarked via timestamp to coincide with the agenda and meeting notes.

The challenge for BizzyWeb was to integrate with the 3rd party broadcasting system and make sure the website didn’t get overloaded with streaming traffic, which uses a lot more bandwidth than a typical website. Working with video software provider and North Metro TV, we found a way to do the integration, and make it easy for both the users to view, but also for North Metro TV to upload onto their website. Ensuring that the hosting package took into account the larger storage space and had enough bandwidth for streaming as well as video on demand was also a challenge, but through extensive traffic studies and watching users move through the site, we came up with a great solution that meets the client’s needs.