Stream city council meetings without a Granicus contract.
Your city council, school board, planning commission, and public-hearing meetings on YouTube + the city website, with the agenda overlay everyone in the chambers already sees. Per-meeting pricing fits your municipal budget. No Granicus annual contract, no Swagit appliance.
Built for the government + civic workflow
No appliance, no AV vendor
A browser studio your city clerk or IT director runs from a chambers laptop. No Swagit-style encoder box to buy and maintain, no AV partner on retainer for every meeting.
Agenda overlay in the canvas
Show the current agenda item as a lower third in the broadcast, updated by the clerk as the meeting advances. It is the same item number the room already sees, with no separate agenda computer feeding an encoder.
Stream to YouTube + city site
YouTube for the public-facing audience and a city website embed for residents who go straight to the city URL, both from one encode at the same time.
Per-meeting pricing
A weekly council meeting and a quarterly planning commission pay for what they actually used. No annual platform contract, no per-camera per-month meter.
Why city clerks pick TRaX
Granicus is the default municipal contract but it is sized for the largest cities and priced accordingly. Swagit and CivicPlus go the appliance-and-service route. TRaX is the in-between: a browser studio the city clerk or IT director can run from a laptop, with the agenda overlay + multi-destination distribution every public meeting actually needs.
- Browser-based: your IT director runs it, no AV vendor on retainer
- Multi-destination output covers YouTube + the city site in one encode
- The public stream archives to YouTube automatically, preserving the meeting record
What a council or school-board meeting runs at
Public meeting video is a record before it is a broadcast. Everything here is chosen so the archive is usable years later by somebody who was not in the room.
- Program canvas
- 1080p30
- A dais and a podium are static. The 30-class rung at 6 Mbps keeps nameplates and projected exhibits readable while staying inside what a municipal building can sustain across a four-hour session.
- Camera in
- Chamber cameras over SRT, or a browser publish
- An existing chamber system publishes over SRT; a small district with one laptop publishes from the browser. Getting a meeting online does not require buying an encoder appliance first.
- Agenda overlay
- The current item, on screen
- Burning the agenda item into the picture is what makes the recording navigable afterwards, which is the difference between an archive that satisfies a records obligation and one that merely exists.
- Destinations
- A public channel and the municipal website
- One encode serves the platform residents already use and the official site the record lives on, leaving no ambiguity about which copy is authoritative.
- Retention
- Per-GB storage, charged monthly
- A four-hour meeting at 1080p30 is roughly 11 GB, so a retention schedule measured in years becomes a figure you can compute and defend in a budget rather than an open-ended commitment.
Programs run at 1080p as standard, and up to 1440p when every destination you have enabled can accept it — the canvas is clamped to the least capable one in the set.
Already comparing the alternatives?
How a council meeting runs on TRaX
- 1
Pre-meeting setup
Camera in the chambers, mic feed from the dais, agenda overlay prepared. Built once, reused every meeting.
- 2
Clerk opens the studio
City clerk or IT director opens the studio on a chambers laptop 15 minutes before gavel.
- 3
Stream the meeting
YouTube goes live, the city site embed updates, and the agenda overlay tracks the item number as the clerk advances it.
- 4
Auto-archive
YouTube archives the public stream automatically, and the recording is saved for the city’s public record.
What a clerk or IT director should know
Three constraints that intersect with public-meeting obligations, which is exactly why they deserve to be stated plainly.
The settings are fixed before the meeting is called to order
Canvas resolution and frame rate are read when the stream begins and hold for the session. For a recurring meeting that is helpful, because the values become part of the room’s standing setup, but it does mean nobody can adjust them once members are seated and the clerk has started.
Captioning is a separate obligation and a separate workflow
Many public bodies must provide captions for meetings that are broadcast or archived. Producing the stream and keeping the recording does not produce a caption track. Decide who supplies it, how quickly, and whether it must be human-verified, because the accessibility requirement sits with the body, not with the platform.
The retention schedule is set by your jurisdiction
Per-GB storage gives you a predictable cost for keeping a recording; it does not tell you how long you are required to keep it, who may request it, or how fast you must respond. Those come from your records law, and the archive is only compliant if somebody has mapped one onto the other.