Updated: 12 hours ago
Dear ADENA Partners, yet another UK council has chosen AREC and Televic solutions to enhance transparency and better engage constituents! Thanks to our distributor, the CUK Group / Tukans, and system integrator Kinly, this time it was Caerphilly Council. Our speaker tracking solution, the DS-9CU, ensures that all active councillors using the Televic D-Cerno are always visible, dynamically switching between connected network PTZ cameras to display them. The resulting video feed is sent to a KL-3T Media Station for recording and can also be streamed directly to social media platforms. Additionally, the DS-9CU feed is used in videoconferencing applications, where it serves as the council’s webcam. Read on to learn more.

Like many councils in the UK, Caerphilly Council places great importance on involving its constituents in the democratic process and making its work visible. It does so through various means – traditional and social media updates, public events, and the recording and streaming of council meetings. While the recordings previously produced by the council offered the public a way to stay informed about its activities, they were difficult to create and, as a result, only selected sessions were recorded and published. In addition, the original recording setup made it challenging to switch between cameras during meetings – meaning that sessions, which could involve up to 99 participants, were mostly captured using a single camera. Recognising the growing demand for high-quality digital content, the council chose to upgrade its AV system with a solution proposed by Kinly.
The solution was built around the AREC DS-9CU – a powerful and versatile 9-channel speaker tracking station. This device effectively replaces live camera crews, significantly reducing costs and simplifying media production and minute-taking tasks. It operates fully automatically and includes a wide range of features tailored to the needs of government institutions. Highly flexible, the DS-9CU supports all types of video inputs, including AREC and third-party PTZ and fixed cameras, computers, and network streams via HDMI, USB, NDI|HX, RTSP, RTMP, and other protocols. The station displays and controls PTZ presets from connected sources through integration with microphone discussion systems, RS-232/TCP/HTTP API commands, and simple manual controls. Reinforcing its role as a camera crew replacement, the DS-9CU automatically composes video layouts featuring up to nine inputs, enhanced with user-defined overlay and background graphics, as well as text.
At Caerphilly Council, the DS-9CU works in conjunction with the Televic D-Cerno discussion system, configured to track 99 seats using three Avonic network PTZ cameras. When a D-Cerno microphone is activated, it prompts the DS-9CU to display one of the cameras assigned to that microphone and to call the corresponding PTZ preset. As discussions become more animated, it is likely that multiple microphones will be active at the same time — the DS-9CU manages this seamlessly using its selectable speaker tracking modes, ‘Override’ and ‘First-in-First-out’, ensuring that each councillor is shown in the correct order.
The council uses the discussion view produced by the DS-9CU as a video source for the KL-3T — a 3-channel Media Station that records and streams council meetings in Full HD. This station is particularly well suited for use in councils thanks to its built-in interactive display, which not only provides a clear overview of the ongoing recording and streaming, but also allows full control over video layouts, graphics, and other settings.

The council is also using the same discussion view as a webcam in videoconferencing applications – primarily Zoom and Teams – by means of an HDMI-to-USB signal converter. Using the DS-9CU in this way has allowed the council to significantly improve the visual clarity of its meetings, making full use of all available cameras and enabling dynamic switching between them without manual intervention.
See how our system works in practice by watching any recent council meeting recording on their YouTube channel – CaerphillyCBCTV – or take a look at the meeting from 23rd July, when the council used our products for the first time:
Would you like to learn more about the DS-9CU or how to incorporate it into your project? Contact us at www.a-dena.com , and we will gladly arrange a live demonstration for you. If you’d like to read more about our latest speaker tracking station and what it can do for your setup, take a look at this informative article: ADENA Hack: How to efficiently modernise a conference room with AREC?