SWIFT rapporteur Jeanine Hennis is congratulated after the vote (EP Flickr)

A “yes” to the Commission did not come as a surprise, but no-one who was there could mistake the political buzz surrounding the decision, itself the result of a process which will have undoubtedly left scars and unfinished business. The debate in the chamber was passionate, the political clashes genuine, the language straight, at times to the point of being what we stuffy Brits might call “unparliamentary”. This was not the turgid technocratic consensus stuff of euromyth. Nor was it play-acting. Under the surface were good old-fashioned ideological clashes, contrasting personalities, plus, variously, hefty doses of radical euro-federalism and militant euroscepticism (with not one, but two, allusions to violence on the streets!) in the smaller groups. Not a routine occasion in anyone’s book. In the end, Barroso got his Commission, indeed with a higher proportion of MEPs supporting him than last time (he was spotted in the chamber examining a table comparing the two occasions), but he would be very optimistic to expect a long honeymoon period with this parliament.

There has rarely been a greater compliment to Parliament, nor a greater acknowledgement of its new-found power

Parliament’s “no” to the SWIFT agreement to provide banking data to the US authorities was a less foregone conclusion, but was in the end passed by a convincing majority. This was the EP taking a position against European governments, the Commission, the Council and (gasp!) the US administration of Barack Obama. Much indeed was made of the lobbying efforts of the Americans, with European imaginations caught by Hillary Clinton’s widely reported calls to Jerzy Buzek, and the inhabitants of the Brussels bubble equally engaged by the efforts of US Ambassador Kennard in the corridors of Strasbourg. For all the outrage of some at the US lobbying of MEPs, there has rarely been a greater compliment to Parliament, nor a greater acknowledgement of its new-found power.

The ultimately solid majority decision to block the SWIFT agreement belied a cliffhanger and a close political call. Immediately before the final decision, a motion to postpone it was defeated by a slim margin of just over 30 votes. The joy of rapporteur Jeanine Hennis-Plaschaert as Parliament followed her recommendation on the substantive vote was unalloyed and the delight of her supporters genuine, though, one might fancy, tempered by a sense of – well, yes, – history.

There was other business in Strasbourg this week of course, but the week’s “maybe” was played out in Brussels as EU leaders met to work out how to respond to the first great crisis of the euro. No, this one was not primarily the Parliament in action, but it nonetheless says much about the new political Europe in which the Parliament has staked its new, greater role. Leaders scurrying to rally the currency, bankers, business, pundits following their every move, workers taking to the streets… Remind you of anything? Surely this is old fashioned “real” politics, the sort that moves markets and hits citizens where it matters – in the pocket.

Yes, it was a huge week. Huge in Parliament, and huge because it gave us a foretaste of the Europe Lisbon built.

I’ve known for a long time that our video streams don’t comply with Macs. It’s a subject we discuss about almost every two months since I started working here. But today, I wanted to understand why. So, like Magnum P.I., I investigated. In order to explain the situation, I’ll have to enter the technical world, hence the caveats below.

CAVEAT: I don’t understand half of what I am writing below. I am NOT an IT guy. Please, please, please don’t write me to bash me on mistakes: better propose a correction in the comments area, that’d be nice.

CAVEAT #02 : The following has been proofread and corrected by one of the genius geek downstairs who prefers to remain anonymous to avoid spam from the other geeks around him (they live in a kind of tribe or something). Still, if something sounds wrong, blame me, not him.

I’ll use the Toyota Five Why method, it sounds cool.

1°- Why Mac users can’t play the hearings’ video streams properly?

Well, they can but they’ll get all audio streams at once. It sounds like the Tower of Babel after its fall. The reason is our video streams are encoded in Windows Media Video format (.wmv) while Macs better work with MPEG4 format. In order to correctly select the video with their language of choice, all users (including PC users) need the latest version of Explorer or Firefox and the latest version of Windows Media Player.

That’s right: to play a video on Internet, you need two things. A browser (Safari, Explorer etc.) and a player (Quicktime, Flash player, Windows Media…). Macs can play .wmv files all right (which is why Macs users can still benefit from our Hearings Video on demands) but they are less efficient in coping with .wmv live streams which include multiple audio files.

I am telling you it works on my PC

2°- Why don’t we encode in MPEG4?

In order to turn an event into a digital movie, you need hell of a lot of stuff (cameras, micros, robotic cameras etc.). To produce the actual file you want to stream, you need video encoding cards. All our audiovisual gear encode live streams in .wmv. We encode the Video on Demand files of the Plenary session in both: in .wmv and in .mpeg4. We don’t have the technical capacity to encode the live streams in both formats at the same time because we don’t have enough encoding video cards. The choice has been made to encode live streams in .wmv.

3°- Why did we chose to encode in .wmv in the first place ?

When we started to broadcast the Plenary session live in video, the .wmv format was the only format that allowed multilanguage url. Multilanguage url allows you to associate one video stream with different audio streams. You don’t have to duplicate the video file, you associate it with a selected audio stream from many available. MPEG4, I am told, was not good at that but it became better lately. At that time, PC users were the vast majority. They still are. Except for all those creative people and journalists who insist on following the Hearings, dammit ;-)

Linux people are extremely good at finding things out by themselves. They know how to play any kind of video streams. They’re super-geeks, you know

4°- Why don’t you use a Flash player like YouTube and all p0rn websites?

This is a good one. Flash video player have become extremely popular on Internet lately and they can work with all video streams source (.wmv or .mpeg4). Users just need the latest version of Flash on their computers and everyone is happy. Flash players are used by europarltv (except for the live streaming).

But. In order to stream a video, you need a transport protocol. We use the protocol rtsp. This protocol doesnt go well in Flash player, mind you, since Adobe (the owner of Flash technology) prefers one uses the rtmp protocol, which belongs to them. If we would move to rtmp protocol, we’d have to buy a lot of licenses. The solution is currently scrutinized. Also, we would use a closed transport protocol, “closed” opposing here the “open source” philosophy.

5- Why don’t you adress Linux users?

My internal IT experts said: “Linux people are extremely good at finding things out by themselves. They know how to play any kind of video streams. They’re super-geeks, you know”. But, to be fair, he also said: “Non-geek Linux users would be lost if we were to chose complicated to set up players, codex, plud-ins and so on.” Hence his taste for a Flash+MPEG4 solution.

Bonus question: will you adress this problem before the next century?

Yes, we will. So far, four solutions are possible.

- We invest in more machines and encoding video cards so we can simultaneously encode our live events in as many video formats as possible, or abandon the .wmv. In all cases, we should be able to propose MPEG4 for live streamings and video on demand. MPEG4 is a pre-condition for almost all possible solutions. Of course, the best amongst you will suggest we use SilverLight (Flash à la Microsoft) which can use a .wmv stream in a SilverLight player. But few have tried. It would cost a lot in research and analysis. And it would be also a proprietary format.

- We buy enough rtmp licenses and we develop Flash players embedded on our website ;

- We develop Flash players embedded on our website able to read directly our MPEG-4 stream via rtsp protocol ;

- We all move to html 5 wich proposes a new “player video” tag which transfers the video playing’s responsibility to the the user browser and not to the video player anymore.

I hope the last sentence is correct because you lost me somewhere around the protocol of transport thing.

The different EP IT teams are working on it. And we will certainly impose easy live streaming for all as a pre-condition of our future new website.

Tibo commented in the last post on editorial aspects of all this, so I’ll just stick to the nuts and bolts. What are we offering?

I was recently asked to sum it up in an email. Here’s what I wrote:

QUOTE

First we have a special hearings website, where we will be referring everyone for the coverage. All stories and press releases on the hearings will be flagged for automatic publishing there, and all hearings will be streamed live.  After the hearings, recorded video-on-demand will be available via the pages devoted to each candidate.

Heads of EU indeed

The site also contains all general infomation (e.g. on the procedure) and all documentation (e.g. CVs, questionnaires, responses, etc.) anyone could reasonably want.

On the Headlines page we have published a “why you should be interested” article, followed by a “how to follow the hearings” piece as a guide to our online offerings. Today, a little “in numbers” article has been added ahead of the meat of the content on the hearings themselves. There is also be a top page banner linking to the hearings site.

Every day during the hearings we will publish an announcement of the hearings scheduled for the day, with all the necessary links. We will also publish a daily roundup of the previous day’s hearings

The Press Service will prepare press releases on each hearing, to be published asap after the hearing.  Each hearing will itself be followed by a press point with the candidate. These will also be webstreamed.

As I said, all relevant material will be published on the hearings website as well as on the usual Headlines and Press Service pages of Europarl.

EuroparlTV will produce a daily news bulletin on the hearings. This will be online in the original language each evening with all other languages added during the night and during the following morning. We will embed these videos in our roundup stories too.

Meanwhile, EuroparlTV has already produced a range of introductory videos on the hearings:

On Facebook, we have an “event” for the hearings, and publish regular status updates through the hearings process. We have set up a “discussion topic” where we will invite Facebook fans to comment on the hearings throughout the process. We will link to this from all our editorial material on the site

On Flickr, we will publish a stream of photos from all the hearings.

On Twitter, though it is sadly not feasible to twitter the whole thing live (!), we will keep up a steady stream of tweets pointing to the latest news, new publications, etc.

On our YouTube channel, we will publish the EuropartTV bulletins in English asap each day.

UNQUOTE

Give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and they’ll come and get it.

Now you know. But – at least here – it’s not really my intention to market what we are doing (though please feel free to follow the links above), but to provide an illustration of where we are now – our current possibilities and limits. This might help the discussion we’re having at the moment about the future of Parliament’s online presence.

I just checked. The early stats are showing a lot of traffic to the hearings website. Some consolation for Tibo, sometimes just give people the access and information they need in a good usable form and, if they’re interested, they’ll come and get it.

Everyone dies at the end.

The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father, the King, and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The play vividly charts the course of real and feigned madness—from overwhelming grief to seething rage—and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.

This is the synopsis of Hamlet, as proposed by Wikipedia. Anyone having watched or read the play would start commenting: Hamlet is so much more than that. It’s full of emotions, plots, twists and so on. Others would object it’s boring, long, over-estimated. When reporting on what the European Parliament does, we find ourselves in this exact situation. We are bound to the quest of impartiality and objectivity. The play performed within the Plenary or the committees may be extremely passionnated or boring like hell, our role is to wait for the final outcomes and to present them in the most accurate and interesting manners.

Our own Elsinore - from our Flickr profile.

The difficulty lies in the “being interesting” part. People read books, watch movies or plays because something is happening. There are conflicts between characters, main protagonists have a goal to reach and obstacles to defeat. News media use the same trick, filling up their reports with emotions, strong characters, human touches. They allow some of their staff to use their voices, turning the piece of news in an editorial or a personal opinion.

Most European politicians have jumped on the storytelling trend too, often replacing traditional political messages with good, simple stories to tell.

We, informing about an institution we belong to, cannot use the full tool box.

Take the hearing: they hardly started and corridors are already full of rumours. We will daily write about the hearings that will have taken place the previous day, but there is no way we can jump to any conclusion. This is because, for each heard Commissioner, the parliamentary committee will first meet in camera (meaning nobody else than the Members can know what is discussed in the said meeting), then they’ll write a confidential letter to the President of the Parliament. In this letter, the committees’ members give their view about the candidate Commissionner they’ve questioned. Then the Conference of Presidents (all political groups leaders) considers the results of all hearings and decide on the vote they will recommend to all Members when the College of commissionners will be presented in a Plenary meeting.

Now, I’ll reveal an open secret: the “confidential” letters? Every journalist in Brussels gets them before we do.  At least it sure seems that way.  As you guess, the whole process is surrounded by rumours, speculations, crystal ball gazing. It’s great. Even for people who don’t give a damn about the whole EU thing, you could sell it.

Brainboxes unsure to get their job.

This is how I would tell the story complying with Hemingway’s six words’ rule.

Unfortunately: we just cannot.

Because we belong to this Institution, we must respect the rules. The procedure.  By doing so, we establish, piece after piece, the reputation and the personality of the institution as a locutor (or a speaker if you’re not into linguistic theory as I am). You, as a citizen, want this locutor to be reliable – all the time. You want it to help you to understand what is really going on, to clarify what belongs to the fairy tales told by some politicians, to the extravaganza shouted by others and to the simple, factual, procedural truth. But this, my friends, requires a little time. And waiting is often boring. You, as a citizen, want, need perhaps, us to be boring. So you can be super interesting and funny in your pieces of news, your blog’s posts, your coffee time chats. We will back you up: facts, real quotes, heavy processes. We’ll be here to be your reference, the footnote in your essay, the hyperlink to source your argumentation.

We do our best to be as un-boring as possible – but try to describe a soccer game with no adjectives, no personal judgement, and no discrimination amongst 22 players even if some didn’t touch the ball. And don’t forget all referees, please. This is cramping.  This is what we do.