European Parliament to launch web TV

The Parliament magazine reports that the European Parliament is to launch an own web TV channel next week.

The move comes after the EP recently launched a web service to follow on-demand (and even record) plenary speeches in addition to their usual live stream during plenary sessions.

While the plenary videos are available in all 23 language versions it needs to be seen in how many languages the new web TV channel will be produced. The European Commission's EUTube channel on YouTube has been much critisised for beeing highly dominated by English languages videos (the service is now partly available in French and German).

Next I list some factors that I think will be important for the success of the new EP web TV:

• Visbility: TV reports need to be linked from many thematic web pages and not only centrally via the web TV startpage


• Accessibility: Linking to individual web TV videos must be made as easy as possible. This is one of the main problems of the Commissions EBS website.


• Credibility: The European Parliament needs to reflect the views of all its members. A well-defined structure needs to be in place to allow a fair distribution of "air time". The last thing Brussels needs is an "information" channel which just brings general topic introductions and voting results. We need a channel that steers the debate about controversial European issues and reflects the discussions that currently often take place within small circles in Brussels or Strassbourg.