Europarl TV: Independent or not, a good initiative!

Europarl TV has been launched on Wednesday. The new on-demand video website provides background videos on European affairs and parliament's business. For more information and details see the EP press release and these media reports.

My view of the project is rather positive as video is clearly becoming more and more popular on the internet and is also something that attracts a younger audience. Overall the website is well done.

Also I think that the approach to have the content provided with multilingual subtitles is a good one. The Europarl TV will be one of the few completely multilingual communication tools that the EU institutions have.

As far as the indepenence of the video productions is concerned it took of course not long until journalists and bloggers started to question the independence of the new website, saying it risks becoming a propaganda tool (and indeed this is a subject that will be difficult to handle for the European Parliament). My view is more in the line of what Julien Frisch said on his blog:

"Having a parliament television provided by the parliament itself that functions without political interference is completely irrealistic."

I go even further and would say that the Europarl TV doesn't even need to be completely neutral. Just think about the European Commission: it's Europa website, spokesperson service and other communication tools are all but neutral. They transport the message with the Commission's spin. Europarl is just a multimedia version of press conferences in the EP. Journalists have to live with the fact that their role as intermediary which filters, corrects and balances what has been said is becoming more and more obsolete on the internet. The only thing that is really needed is that members of the European parliament have a fair access to this communication tool and that the messages are not controlled by the EP president or the EP Bureau.

Improvements needed: embedd code and RSS feeds

One more thing that is positive with Europarl TV is that it allows the re-use of the video content, provided that it is not on a commercial base. However, the embedd code doesn't really work yet. For the moment it is a simple link and doesn't allow to embedd the video à la YouTube.

Also it is quite strange that the website doesn't offer RSS feeds. I hope that it will soon be added so that people can get notified in their RSS reader when new videos are posted.