Euro Parliament TV

The Euro Parliament TV (http://www.europarltv.europa.eu/) has just been launched, and it needs to be remembered from now on as a visionary project that aims to create a single TV in which different languages, different cultures and different countries can share a single message related to the EU. It is not (yet) exactly what John Lennon imagined to be a place for “all the people, sharing the entire world”, but it is a start.

The first thing to notice about the Euro Parliament TV is the different number of audios and subtitles available in the site. I am not talking about the possibility to listen to news dubbed in your own language, but mostly I am referring to the chance to listen to other languages being spoken by other EU citizens. This is something that we cannot easily find in most of the national TVs. We can often listen to German, French and English people speaking, but EU has got much more languages than that. In this sense, Euro Parliament TV needs to be celebrated because it offers content with more diversity.

Some could argue that the Euro Parliament TV is the beginning of a unified European Union public sphere, but we need to emphasise the word “beginning”. We can use it to listen to news, we can see other people from other parts of the Union, and we can share a single message if we all access frequently the site, but we cannot express ourselves on Euro Parliament TV. It is, so far, a good example of a communicative sphere, but it’s not yet a complete deliberative sphere.

Some suggestions for the future should point to this direction. For example, in the current site people cannot post their own videos if they want to reply to what they just saw. If video comments can be moderated in order to remove hate speech or spam messages, why people could not be allowed to express themselves (directly) through the TV?

Another idea equally important is to let people choose what they want to see in Euro Parliament TV. Why not attach a discussion forum to gather ideas? Forums like that already exist in each national “blog sphere”, but the EU Parliament TV can use its expertise to create a shared forum across EU countries. The idea to join TV (an audiovisual experience) with a forum (a textual experience) is not that bad if we can translate messages to other languages.

One last point of attention: the page needs to improve its “technicalities” and make it simpler to share videos over the internet. Blogs for example are always “spreading the news”, but the embedded function is not as good as it could be (see for example how YouTube deals with it, and it becomes clear that things can be improved). For example, click here to see news about immigration and check how the embedded functions are limited.

In sum, Euro Parliament TV needs to be celebrated. It is a massive work that requires a massive investment. In the future, it will have grouped lots of expertise to produce content oriented to all Europe, which can be used in other projects. But so far, more deliberation is required to be included in the project.