On his working visit to Novosibirsk the prime minister checked the operation of web cameras at a polling station.
Polling station 984 is located in Gornostay Gymnasium No. 6, Sovetsky District. To ensure video streaming on the election day, a hardware and software suite was installed comprising a PC, two USB video cameras, a monitor and continuous power supply. All the equipment was placed in a special safe.
Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media Ilya Massukh said the safe will be unlocked and the camera will either turn on automatically or will be turned on by the head of the local election board.
The software is completely Russian-made, the deputy minister said, adding that the design of the interface is based on a traffic light: if something fails, a red or yellow indicator turns on, if everything is all right, the indicator is green.
"The streaming has a one minute lag," Ilya Massukh said. "The video is recorded in two places – here (at the polling station) and in compressed form at the Data Processing Centre (DPC)".
"Will the camera record the vote count?" Vladimir Putin asked. "That's right, the chairman of the election board will come up to the camera, show the protocol and read out each line," Ilya Massukh answered. "The main thing is to make sure that nothing is pilfered," the prime minister added.
"We shall record a total of 500 years of video in just one day," the deputy minister said. "By comparison, YouTube users download four years of videos a day." To save the video, the DPC servers have a combined capacity of 22 petabytes. The information will be stored for one year.
At present, about a half of all polling stations in the country are equipped with web cameras, Mr Massukh said. About 91 thousand video surveillance units are to be installed altogether. "Every day approximately seven thousand polling stations have them installed. We install a camera at one polling station every minute," he explained.
The official site that will carry the streaming video of voting and the vote count was unveiled on February 3 (www.webvybory2012.ru). To watch the election live one has to log in before March 3.
Vladimir Putin was shown how the internet resource is organised. The home page of the site features a map of Russia showing all the polling stations. They can be searched either step-by-step (i.e. first select a region, then a town and so on) or through a search engine.
"The final stage of the project is the subsequent use of the equipment," Mr Massukh noted. "That is why we have announced two contests – one for the logo and the other for the next use of the equipment. The winner will get a computer with a webcam."
Rostelecom has already submitted a proposal on how to use the cameras after the election. The head of the company, Alexander Provotorov, said the cameras may be employed in education. According to him, a prototypical educational internet channel has already been designed. He showed the prime minister a few videos on wildlife, history, and English lessons. These were BBC and the National Geographic videos, but Mr Provotorov remarked that Russian TV channels are also capable of producing such programmes.
"That's great," said the prime minister. "All this will not be wasted."
To demonstrate how the site works, the deputy minister selected several polling stations in the Kalinigrad and Volgograd regions and showed live video from them.
Mr Massukh said that when the work began, only 21,000 polling stations had internet connections capable of transmitting video. Now high-quality internet connections have been set up in those locations, which otherwise would have taken five years.
"All right, thank you for your work, I hope everything will be done well and on time," Vladimir Putin said.