WOULD you tune in to watch Swindon Borough Council TV: Raw and Uncut?

Because two councillors are proposing just such a service, with a motion calling on the council to record and broadcast whole meetings.

Bob Wright (Lab., Central) and Mark Dempsey (Lab., Parks) will table the formal motion at this week’s gathering of the full council, suggesting that the borough should pay to make its meetings – some of which can last several hours – available on its website.

Their plan is for full council, planning committee, scrutiny committee and licensing meetings to be uploaded for broadcast to residents.

Coun Wright said: “If you’re going to have openness and transparency with the public about your dealings, if the public can’t make meetings, we could at least invite them through some kind of broadcast.

“Parliament TV has been going for a long time, and has been quite successful “And if it’s good enough for parliament, surely its good enough for local government.

“We don’t have to spend too much on it. Just enough to set it up and try it.”

But the costs could be “spiralling”, warned one web expert.

And the council has questioned whether there’d be any demand for it in the first place.

Stephen Musson, partner at Aura-Digital in West Swindon, said the cost of recording a single meeting would be hundreds of pounds, with more storage costs for the data on top of that.

Mr Musson said: “I guess those meetings would probably go on for some time. If they’re going to be hosting videos themselves, the data storage of just one meeting would be pretty hefty.

“YouTube only allows you to upload 10 minutes. So that’s going to be massive. If you’re dealing with a four-hour video, it would be over one gigabyte.

“A DVD is 700 megabytes for one-and-a-half hours. With someone recording it and uploading it, you’re talking about a couple of hundred.

“If you said £200 per video and they put up 10 videos, the cost is spiralling.”

And in a statement, the council said it would be even more.

It said the initial cost for the equipment would be “£8,000 to £10,000”, and another £25,000 per year for “extra internet hosting to stream these meetings live.”

Its statement reads: “Although we have no figures for viewing elsewhere, there is no evidence that these meetings attract a high audience.

“There are already well-used means for public participation including public question time, petitions and Cabinet Open forum, as we well as watching meetings from the public gallery.”

Council leader Rod Bluh (Con., Dorcan) also sent through a single line of comment.

It said simply: “Why should we pay £35,000 of council taxpayers’ money to provide a service citizens can already get for free?”