Our court reporting firm is often asked to provide streaming services at depositions.  Attorneys and/or expert witnesses at remote locations are able to log onto a url and can participate by seeing and hearing the proceedings.  They are also able to read the realtime text as the court reporter is taking down the testimony.

The downside to the stream is the audio/video portion has an 8 – 15 second lag.  There is no lag for the text stream.  We advise our clients to use a speaker phone if they want to participate in realtime to make objections or statements on the record.

Our legal video department uses an audio video encoder called a VBrick that “pushes” the A/V from onsite to our media servers that will broadcast the event over the Internet.  The VBrick does not have wireless capabilities and requires a hardwired Ethernet connection.  The VBrick is a network appliance incapable of passing through authentication screens (like you might see at a hotel or Starbucks, for instance); nor can it pass traffic through a Proxy server or Microsoft ISA type server.

Our Discovery Conference Centre was built for streaming through a VBrick.  We have put in two T-1 lines dedicated to streaming via the Internet.

The video and transcript are two separate technologies, independent of each other.  There is no onsite, physical connection between the court reporter/text stream and the legal videographer/video stream.  Both the court reporter and the legal videographer need to be connected to the Internet.

When you have a witness that can’t get to an arbitration, or an expert who doesn’t have time to travel across the country to attend a deposition of a rebuttal expert, streaming can be a perfect solution.