Note on Code Swaraj
they’d send me a test disk to see if I could read it. When it comes to video, I haven't just fallen off the turnip truck and I could indeed read their disks!
What happened next was kind of amusing. House Broadcast sent me a binder by Federal Express with 50 Blu-ray DVD discs in it. I opened it up and looked at it, and it sure looked like not only was the data I wanted for the House Oversight there, it appeared there was data for all committees, with over 600 hours of broadcast-quality video in the binder.
I promptly ran out and bought six Blu-ray readers and hooked them up to my Mac desktop and copied the data, six discs at a time, and sent the binder back by overnight courier to Washington. I called my contact back the next day, thanked him, and asked casually if they had any more. “Sure, we have lots of this stuff. Would you like another?” So, they sent me another binder. All that summer, they kept sending me more and more binders. I’d copy them and send them back. When those were done, I bought a ticket to Washington and asked them if they had anything else. Turns out they had a pile of disk drives stuffed behind the equipment racks, so I bought packing tape and boxes from the FedEx store and brought them down to the basement of the Rayburn Building and packed them all up for shipping.
By the end of the summer, I had about 14,000 hours of video from congressional hearings. I then found myself in a meeting with the Speaker’s general counsel to discuss plans for going forward. I had offered to hook the Congress up with a 2.4 gigabit line directly from the basement of the Capitol, out to C-SPAN, and then onto the Internet 2 backbone. That would have allowed for broadcast-quality video to be livestreamed to the entire country simultaneously from 48 concurrent hearings, allowing the Internet Archive, YouTube, local news stations, and others to access the proceedings of Congress.
I even spent $42,000, money intended for other purposes, on dedicated hardware encoders and ethernet switches and had mounted them all in a rack and brought photographs of the setup with me. I explained that this would all be at no cost to the government, the hardware already existed, we could have this entire thing up and running in 90 days. It was ready to go.
We even knew the precise location in the basement of the U.S. Capitol where we would patch the incoming fiber over to the video feeds from the House Broadcast Studio. Our meeting was in September 2011, and I told the staff we could have them up and running by January 2012, in time for the opening of
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