The village rolled out the program last week, directing people to log onto its Web site, clicking on the "Open and Transparent Government" link at the top left corner of the home page.

While Riverside has had its board meetings online since March, anyone wanting to find them had to log onto a site called Blip TV and then search for the videos. As of last week, the videos have been embedded into the Riverside Web site and are available immediately, with no searching or sifting through results.

"This is a nice feature in terms of keeping it with the whole village wrapper, without launching another window," said Interim Village Manager Robin Weaver. "It's one way to make it easier for people and capture their interest."

Village Trustee Mark Shevitz, who is the board's chairman for open government, was the person behind moving the videos to the village site.

"We campaigned on getting the videos on the Web site and we wanted to make sure we saw it through," Shevitz said.

It's the Riverside Cable Commission that deserves the credit for the work, however, Shevitz said. With a limited amount of room on the village's Web server, Shevitz said the Blip TV option was probably the best, most inexpensive way to provide meeting videos.

"It allows us to provide the content without having to eat up space on our server," Shevitz said.

While there are some issues with the conversion process from TV to Web video, the commission has been able to get the videos to Blip TV in a timely fashion. Blip TV shows the videos in a Quicktime format, while the village site converts them into Flash.

"As we get the process down for conversion, we can think about quality issues as well," Shevitz said. "It's our first pass at this stuff, and I'm real pleased it's up."

-Bob Uphues