Video capabilities for House Committee proceedings is the subject of an RFI originally published on June 20th and supplemented on July 22nd. It’s focused on the “potential to host and livestream official Congressional hearing videos, and to provide public access to archived hearing videos.” Comments are due by August 30th.
“Currently, U.S. House of Representatives (House) Members, Committees, Leadership Offices and staff streams each committee hearing and markup to committee-controlled YouTube channels. For the public to view these hearings, they must locate and navigate to the respective YouTube channel, where they have access to both live and on-demand video. There are currently 19 standing committees, their [sic] are numerous subcommittees, and another five select committees. The average amount of committee coverage is approximately 3,000 hours each year.”
It is good to see the House exploring creating a centralized portal for the videos, as well as archiving the videos, providing closed captioning, data analytics, and the use of APIs to integrate with automatic scheduling of hearings. Also, it’s smart to move off YouTube as the primary point of access, even though it may have made sense when it was done initially.
The online streaming of House proceedings was itself the focus of sustained efforts about a decade ago and is now required by House rules. Progress was a struggle at times. Even when the rules were changed, as I wrote back in April 2012, not all committees were properly implementing the requirement.
Nowadays, some House videos are incorporated onto Congress.gov, with the data pulled only when the unique ID accompanying each event is published on each committee’s YouTube page. It’s technologically possible for the folks at the Library of Congress, who are responsible for Congress.gov, to connect every YouTube video to the corresponding congressional hearing in the absence of the event ID, but it has not happened yet. Either the committees need to ensure the IDs are included or the Library should come up with a technical work-around, such as fuzzy matching. In either case, we suspect that the Committee on House Administration will need to step in and direct a fix. (Perhaps this will get addressed on a prospective basis when the new committee portal is created.)
The Senate committee video setup is different. The Senate doesn’t publish committee videos on YouTube and there is no official central website for committee video, although the FAI’s Lars Schonander did manage to identify links to hearing videos going back to the year 2000 and publish them on his website.
Congress.gov has started incorporating Senate committees videos from the last year or two on their website, but there’s apparently no plans to go further back in time. Unlike the House, the Senate does not have a central committee documents portal, although they do post notices of upcoming hearings at a central website.
The Senate has indicated it is working on some kind of a video solution that will address accessibility and archiving, although a report from a working group on that topic is overdue. As of June 2024, the Senate has not begun working on the project, but “a joint solution [has been] identified and reportedly agreed to by all parties.”
What I would like to see is all existing committee videos from both chambers linked to or embedded in Congress.gov alongside other documents from committee proceedings as they occur, as well as included in centralized House and Senate committee document repositories at the moment the proceedings are scheduled.
