A new streaming channel has been launched to give viewers a sneak peek into City Council meetings

The release of Hamlet was a very personal matter for Sunil Rajaraman.

Back in 2022, he’s running for city council in a small town in California. He lost, but that moment forever changed the way he saw the place, and local governments, for that matter.

“I was trying to become a better candidate,” he recalls. “I wanted to understand how my city actually worked, what decisions were made, why, and who said what. And I couldn’t figure it out. It’s a complete black box, almost intentionally opaque.”

Since the coronavirus, cities across the country have begun recording their city meetings and posting them online. That gave Rajaraman an idea: a company that helps people understand what’s happening in local governments. In the same year, 2022, Hamlet was released to do just that.

“We use artificial intelligence to process thousands of hours of video of City Council and planning commission meetings and turn it into intelligence they can actually use,” he said. He said these videos are better than meeting minutes because those documents are just someone’s explanations of what happened. “Video doesn’t lie.”

At first, he thought it would be a media company, but then real estate developers and political action committees started reaching out to them. Rajaraman realized that private companies had to deal with local governments, too, and wanted more knowledge about what was happening at those city council meetings.

For enterprise clients, the company helps track agendas and alerts them when relevant topics are covered across target cities. It also collects what happened after meetings, so they don’t have to watch hours-long videos, and lets them search the video archive to see, for example, when and how a competitor was mentioned in a local government setting.

Hamlet has raised about $10 million in venture funding to date, from backers including Slow Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Banana Capital and Kapor Capital. “We want to be the ‘Bloomberg’ of this space, so to speak,” Rajaraman said.

Rajaraman announced Friday that he is expanding the company to launch Hamlet TV as a way to help keep ordinary citizens informed about what is happening within their governments. Available on TikTok, YouTube, AppleTV and Instagram, the streaming channel will highlight important moments from council, committee and school board meetings.

Rajaraman said his company has handled thousands of hours of government meetings for government clients.

“We witnessed meetings that lasted more than 15 hours without stopping,” he said. He and his team started organizing funny moments from those meetings, and they thought it would be a good idea to use humor to make people more interested in American democracy. “If you show people procedural videos, they won’t care. But if you show them the funny stuff, they’ll watch it.”

The most surprising thing he and his team have seen so far on Hamlet TV is someone dressing up as a cockroach to address their city council about a pest problem. He said it’s not the funny things that surprise him. “It’s about how important these meetings are and how invisible they remain.”

He cited an example earlier this year when the Tucson City Council rejected a $3.6 billion Amazon data center. He said the decision came after months of planning, but likely only a few people watched those videos to understand why it happened.

This is not the first time Rajaraman has run a company or a media outlet. He co-founded analytics platform Scripted and was twice Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Foundation Capital. He also ran a publication called The Bold Italic, which he sold to Medium.

He knows that Hamlet TV probably won’t be a money maker and reiterated that he is doing it to make people more involved in the state of democracy in the country. He also plans to give away the Hamlet tool to local journalists for free. “Data is great, but context is very important,” he said.

Next, Hamlet looks forward to working with government affairs, advocacy organizations and renewable energy developers. “Democracy works best when people are watching,” he said. “We try to make viewing possible.”