Case Study: Motion passed, tracked, and translated with AREC in Bristol City Council

Dear ADENA Partners, this month, we are highlighting a case study from Bristol City Council in the United Kingdom. Thanks to the work of our distributor, Tukans (part of the CUK Group), and system integrator, Nuway, the council uses the DS-9CU Speaker Tracking Station for its public and private meetings, as well as two KS-CC1 Translation and Transcription Stations for multilingual meetings. The solution has significantly improved the production quality of council meetings and provided a major improvement over the previous system, effectively tracking and displaying every speaker for the public to see without operator involvement. Find out more about the solution in the story below.

Bristol City Council is the governing authority for the city of Bristol. It is one of the oldest councils in the country, having received its charter in the 14th century. In its present form, the council is responsible for day-to-day services, social care, management of public infrastructure, museums, parks, and a number of other functions. It carries out these tasks from City Hall, a building whose construction began before the Second World War but which did not open until 1956.

Last year, the council decided that it was time to modernise City Hall’s AV infrastructure. While the original system could be used to stream council meetings, it required an operator to function, and its age was starting to show. The system could not deliver Full HD quality, did not include automatic speaker tracking, and transitions between speakers caused the image to go completely black. The council looked for a solution that could address these shortcomings and chose the proposal from system integrator Nuway. Working with our distributor, Tukans (part of the CUK Group), Nuway created a solution that fully met the council’s needs using products from AREC, Televic, Extron, and Angekis.

DS-9CU Speaker Tracking Station

At the core of this solution is the AREC DS-9CU Speaker Tracking Station. This multifunctional 9-channel station combines the features of a video mixer, switcher, and streamer, making it ideal for councils, courts, and other environments where seated discussions take place. The station can operate in automatic or manual mode. In automatic mode, the DS-9CU acts like a camera crew, responding to microphone activations and deactivations by recalling PTZ presets on associated video sources and displaying them in dynamically changing layouts that can simultaneously feature up to nine speakers. In manual mode, the user can control the entire production using any of the station’s various control options. For example, the user can control the pan, tilt, and zoom of any of the connected cameras using the built-in GUI joystick and change which video sources are displayed on the station’s multiple outputs.

On top of that, the DS-9CU offers plenty of options to tailor the experience to the user’s needs, regardless of the mode in which it is operating. For tracking, these include FIFO and Override tracking modes, layout switch delays, camera hold times, and support for an unlimited number of microphones and discussion systems to be tracked simultaneously. For the visual experience, the station offers a built-in video layout editor for creating new or modifying existing video layouts, textual overlays for introducing speakers, and image-based overlays and backgrounds for featuring organisation logos and designs, among other features.

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In addition to the DS-9CU, the council is also using two KS-CC1 Translation and Transcription Stations. These devices are designed to caption speech in a selected language and translate that speech into two other languages, creating transcripts and subtitle files for all three languages in the process. The captioned or translated text can be shared in several ways: it can be displayed over the connected video input and streamed, displayed instead of the video input, or accessed through the station’s subtitle page.

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KS-CC1 Translation and Transcription Stations

At Bristol City Council, the DS-9CU works with the Televic D-Cerno microphone system and multiple Angekis Saber X PTZ cameras. Most of the time, the station operates in automatic mode, following speakers as they activate their microphones and displaying them in multichannel layouts. This ensures that viewers can see and hear all participants, even during active discussions. When the council does not need automatic tracking, it can manually control active video sources and their PTZ functions using API commands sent through an Extron control system. During public hearings, the station’s mixed video output is streamed to the council’s YouTube channel, allowing everyone to follow the proceedings. During private hearings and multilingual events, the council also deploys KS-CC1 stations, ensuring smooth communication despite language barriers. You can see how the system works in any of the latest published hearings, such as this one:

https://youtu.be/ZWrjuvVZvIE

The solution created by our partners has greatly improved the production quality and viewing experience of Bristol City Council hearings, introducing new capabilities and eliminating the limitations of the previous system. 

Are you working on modernising AV systems for councils? Contact us at www.a-dena.com and let’s discuss how AREC solutions can be used in your projects to achieve similarly great results.