When I began working at Mecklenburg County, we used a live stream platform that was prone to frequent service interruptions.  We had little in the way of customer support and had no input for development points or design options.  In 2018, I collaborated with team members and department heads to search for a new vendor that would give us increased live stream functionality, a better customer service relationship, and a more user-friendly experience for our customers. I wanted our vendor to operate entirely without any on-site physical equipment, pushing instead for cloud encoding and storage.  Knowing that we had Microsoft's Azure development environment at our disposal, we moved forward with searching for vendors who would utilize this powerful asset.

After sorting through RFPs and several rounds of vendor demonstrations, we selected Ravnur Enterprise Video to be our primary live stream vendor. 

The Public Portal serves as a catch-all for displaying live meetings and VOD media assets.  Recorded meetings can be searched by date range, organization, categories, and by appearances by individuals.

The media VOD page is interactive with clickable PDF links, searchable transcripts, and facial recognition functionality.

Using a dedicated encoder, I stream content 24/7 to a VM at MS US East, which serves as a republication point for RTMP streams.  This distribution process allows for a simplified user-friendly experience for my team, allowing them to start a meeting in minutes with only a few steps.

Because we can stream to the ingest URLs from anywhere in the world, we've been able to host more live remote meetings and town halls with organizational leaders.