Reno: Municipal Programming Takes a Hit on The Internet

The City of Reno has long had an excellent web presence.  In particular, the past two or three versions of their website have all been excellent, the current one is very beautiful and content-rich.

For a very long time, The Media Center, aka SNCAT, has provided a wonderful resource in the Truckee Meadows community in the form of a bookable studio that ordinary people can use to produce public access programming, and also by serving to CATV and Internet the municipal programming provided by Reno, Sparks, and Washoe County.  These three government channels all offer a range of content which should allow an attentive person to keep up with the business of their local governments.  SNCAT appears to have a great system in place for (a) live streaming, (b) archival of past programming, and (c) presentation of all that content.

So it was with some surprise that I noticed the disappearance of Reno from SNCAT's internet streaming website, sncatstream.com, shortly after the launch of Reno's current website design.  Right after the launch of the new site, in fact, Reno was praised right here for its new website, with particular attention given to the video page, which highlighted Reno 13 programming.

Of course, the list page for Reno's programming, and the calendar page for Reno's programming, continued to exist on SNCAT's site, and were frequently updated, to boot.  So it was easy to stay up to date.  All the content, in fact, became an invaluable source of post fodder.  Regular readers can most likely recall council meetings reported on here, for example.  Municipal programming is a great source of information for those highlighting the bread and butter business of city government.

But over a month ago, new content from Reno 13 stopped appearing on sncatstream.com.  Inquiries to various places finally provided me with a response from someone with the city, who indicated that programming would be updated on the Reno 13 shows page, and that they are currently looking at how to archive city council meetings.

Really.  Did you know, that right in the Truckee Meadows, there's a service that already archives municipal programming for on-demand viewing?  That it's the same organization that has been doing it for the city for years?  How ridiculous can you get? 

Write SNCAT a check, Reno.  Get the archives working again, get the live stream working again, and focus your otherwise excellent web team on making the city website even better, maybe work with SNCAT to develop an embeddable player like what you find on YouTube.  Duplicating SNCAT's work isn't helping anyone here.