Webcasting is one of the European Council’s most important tools to foster transparency and promote open discussion. Each year, the Council streams and archives over 700 hours of debates and press conferences. This is no easy feat, as each debate can be broadcast in up to 32 languages. In 2014, the Council ran a tender process to develop on the service.

The challenge

The previous solution was based on Silverlight. Silverlight brought three challenges:

• Users need to install an additional browser plugin before streaming video
• Lack of support for H.264 (a more efficient way of encoding and compressing video)
• Minimal support for mobile and tablet devices.

Furthermore, Microsoft is no longer invested in the development of Silverlight, with an announcement to end its support by 2021. The Council therefore put out a tender to procure the new functionality.

Developing bespoke webcasting tools for the European Council

The council needed an intuitive system, which allowed them to stream press conferences with little notice. The system had to be incorporated into the Council’s brand guidelines and work seamlessly with the current website.

Media Platform is StreamAMG’s flagship product for encoding, managing and distributing video content. StreamAMG built on top of this central platform to create a system which was fully bespoke to the Council’s needs and requirements. This included:

• Branded front end
• Revamped back end interface – quickly schedule and stream webcasts with little notice
• Two factor authentication – reduce the risk of security breaches
• HTML5 players – results in faster loading than any other player in the market
• Searchability – help the public and press quickly find the content they’re looking for.

The service launched in January 2016.