CityWest glitches left large gaps in Prince Rupert Council Forum presentation

CityWest viewers found that Monday's Council Forum made for a night
of frustration, with technical issues plaguing their coverage of the event 

***See Update Below***

The perils of live television were on prominent display through the CityWest Community channel coverage of Monday night's City Council Forum at the Lester Centre, with a string of outages leaving those at home clicking refresh repeatedly on their computer browsers, while viewers of the community cable channels stared at a frozen screen for lengthy periods of time.

Things were going well until the start of the opening remarks from the council hopefuls about fifteen minutes into the broadcast, where halfway through the panel, the presentation came to a sudden end. The video disappearing into the Twilight Zone just as Councillor Barry Cunningham was about to recount his years on Council and we assume his call for an opportunity to serve for another four ahead.

Owing to the outage, viewers at home would never learn of the opening themes from Wade Niesh, Nick Adey, Reid Skelton-Morven or Blair Mirau.

As the evening moved along, like the days of old of pulling in a television show with rabbit ears, the video would come back only to stutter to a stop again, making it near impossible to follow the line of questions that had been prepared by the Chamber of Commerce members, or the three contributions of the thirty six that the public submitted through online opportunities.

The audience would get a partial glimpse of the closing comments by nights end, though again a few of the candidates were missing from that rotation as well, leaving home viewers with a rather incomplete picture of the night.

All eight candidates were on hand for Monday night's City council forum
however not all of them were heard, as glitches made for an incomplete
picture of the themes and discussions on the night.
(Screenshot from CityWest Community channel Facebook)

The live feed did return for a six minute speed reading address from Mayor Lee Brain, who sought to condense his ninety minute Hays 2.0 blue print presentation of the spring into the six minutes allotted for his forum appearance.

Taking to the stage, the Mayor highlighted a stream of topics and themes that have been the focus of City Council over the last few years, making the strongest points when it came to the Port Tax Caps, the need for fairness from the province on revenue distributions and the ongoing feud that the City appears determined to escalate with the District of Port Edward over the issues of the Ridley Island Tax Sharing Agreement.

With Mr. Brain returning to his concerns that Port Edward does not contribute to what the city refers to as shared services, calling it a free ride for Port Edward that needs to be renegotiated.

Those themes can be reviewed further  here, culled from one of the segments that did make it to air through the night.

As the evening came to an end CityWest advised that they would be replaying the full debate through their Community channels later in the evening and again through the week.

While the community channel replays are welcome, in fairness to those candidates that ended up lost in some digital vacuum of the Internet, what CityWest should also offer up is placement of the full council forum as part of their Facebook feed

That is something that they did for the two and a half hour Kitimat forum of last week, so it is possible it would seem.

Viewers in Prince Rupert should be afforded the same opportunity to review the entire council forum featuring all of the candidates, something that will fill in the gaps from a night where the screens were frozen, as often as they were delivering the talking points of the council hopefuls.

Until they do, you can try to piece together the current of conversation from the snippets of the forum that remain available on the CityWest Community Channel page.

Update: Chris Armstrong, CityWest's Director of Marketing, has provided an update on the Civic Forum situation of Monday evening, observing that initial indications point to equipment failure as a result of the broadcast woes of the evening.

To provide for additional coverage of the Monday Forum, CityWest plans to air two replays of the Lester Centre event for Cable viewers, with the first Wednesday evening at 7PM, the Second on Sunday at 7PM.

As well, they will be adding the Forum to their Facebook page, with hopes of having it posted to that portal as early as Wednesday, once it is available for streaming you can access it here.

***The majority of the City Council Forum has been posted to a YouTube page set up for the occasion, thought there do still appear to be some gaps in the night's discussion***


For more items of interest related to the 2018 Prince Rupert Municipal election see our archive page here.


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