Friday 30 January 2009

EuroparlTV costs 60,000 Euros per hour

German tech news site Heise.de reports that the online TV of the European Parliament (criticised from the beginning) - EuroparlTV - has had only 150,000 visitors so far, less than 40,000 per month.

That's not very much, taking into account that according to Austrian calculations one hour of broadcasting costs 60,000 Euros.

How to solve this problem? EuroparlTV has already decided: They will spend more money on a marketing campaign...


Read also: Oh what a turn off by Bruno Waterfield (17 February 2009)

6 comments:

citizen of Europe said...

Für die europäische Identität wäre es besser eine gesamteuropäische TV, die alle Bewohner Europas annehmen könten. Solche TV aber müsste ausser den Hände der Nationalregierungen stehen (etwas unvorstellbares in jetzigen EU), der grösste Problem wäre jetzt nichtsdestoweniger seine Sprache - alle Bürger Europas verstehen nicht eine gesamte Sprache und est ist nicht möglich in alle europäischen Sprachen senden.

Julien Frisch said...

I agree that we need an all-European TV without the national governments interfering too much.

When it comes to language, subtitling would be the right solution, so the television would be produced in changing EU languages and would be subtitled differently for every country.

That would be a really cool thing: Everyday the main news in a different language. I would definitely watch this!

Julien Frisch said...

PS: Dobré ráno! :-)

citizen of Europe said...

Děkuji :-)

Your idea of a multilingual TV is nice but impractical (see the costs (and delays) of translating in European Parliament). I prefer other idea of ONE common language for the whole EU (I didn't mean by it an abolition of other languages). And what language should it be? A strictly neutral language (so not English or French). It suffices to peep into the history of Europe - such period of one common language already was. The language I have in mind was/is ... Latin.

Antal Dániel said...

Probably it would be better to scale down the project to the demand. Just have a look at EUX.TV. There numbers are comparable, and I guess they have not spent 60000 euros since they exist!

Raymond Frenken said...

EuroparlTV was sold internally as a webtv project that would have an attractive cost-per-viewer-ratio because it would not require expensive satellite distribution. But it's astonishing to see that they still have a budget that would easily make satellite distribution possible.

With a budget like EuroparlTV, EUX.TV could easily be a 24 hours channel on satellite. Use a team of about 10 professional videojournalists to roam the corridors in Brussels; studios at the parliament and the commission, FTP-based satellite programming with a system also used by Fashion TV (20k/month), some money for proper branding and marketing, and there you go...

As founder of EUX.TV I'm still astonished to see how little enthusiasm there is in Brussels for a project like ours.

It must be because it's not controlled by the bureaucrats...