Thursday 29 April 2010

Council live streaming & tender statistics

The EU Council needs a new video & audio streaming provider.

This news was spread by the great new voice of the EU Council administration on Twitter, @Dana_Council, and this news is connected to an official tender that runs until 24 May 2010.

The whole tender linked above is interesting to read because it tells a lot about the audiovisual needs of the Council of the European Union, both for external but also for internal communication.

One of details mentioned in the tender that I'd like to highlight are the unique visitors statistics of the Council's present streaming platform for the last three years:
in 2007, 3 000 for live streaming and 16 000 for on-demand;
in 2008, 5 000 for live streaming and 11 000 for on-demand;
in 2009, 13 000 for live streaming and 35 000 for on-demand.
I'm no expert in web statistics but I'd say that these are pretty bad figures for an institution that represents 500 million citizens and unites governments of 27 member states with tens of thousands of national officials.

There is a lot of room for improvement.

It is thus to hope that the new streaming provider will deliver high-quality and easy-to-use services, with good searchability and intelligent tagging, making it easy to find content and to use it for ex post reporting, but also that the Council will show more transparency and make more of its work visible to the citizens of the Union through audiovisual media.

The only questions I ask myself are: Why is this just a tender for the Council and not a joint tender for all EU institutions? Wouldn't it be intelligent to have a common audiovisual platform for all the institutions?

But it's probably business as usual - institutional ego before public service...

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