Company:
European Parliament
Project Timeline:
Approx. 6 months
Services:
Development support and concept development
Summary:
The European Parliament is one of the European Union’s key institutions, representing the interests of around 450 million citizens. As a directly elected institution, it plays a central role in EU legislation, democratic oversight, and political debate. To make parliamentary proceedings more transparent and accessible to the public, a modern web streaming platform was developed.
Commissioned by G&L Systemhaus, netTrek was responsible for developing and integrating the Content Management System (CMS), which provides the technical foundation for managing and delivering live and on-demand content. Working alongside G&L, which implemented the streaming infrastructure, we created a powerful, multilingual, and accessible solution designed to make parliamentary content easier to access digitally.
Challenge
The Challenge:
The European Parliament holds thousands of meetings and events each year that are of significant public interest. While sessions were already being streamed, the content was not yet consolidated within a single, clearly structured platform. It was also difficult for users to access content in specific languages or efficiently distribute individual speeches and contributions.
Another key challenge was technical scalability. The platform needed to support live streaming in up to 24 languages while also providing access to an archive of more than 89,000 videos from previous sessions and events. In addition, content needed to be distributed efficiently across social media platforms and external websites.
Goals and Requirements:
- Make content accessible to citizens, including support for accessibility requirements and up to 24 languages
- Provide a scalable and highly reliable platform capable of handling large audiences
- Optimize content for social media and external platforms, including real-time editing and distribution during live sessions
- Provide a powerful CMS for efficiently managing session content, metadata, and multilingual information
Solution
Our Approach:
To meet these requirements, a modular hybrid architecture was developed that combines on-premises and cloud technologies. This approach provides a high degree of flexibility and scalability while ensuring reliable, high-performance content delivery.
A central component of the solution is the Content Management System developed for the platform. The CMS serves as the backbone of the system and enables precise control, management, and optimization of streaming content. Interfaces to the European Parliament’s internal systems allow sessions to be scheduled, processed, and published through automated workflows.
A powerful media player was also developed to provide seamless navigation through parliamentary sessions. Users can switch between available language versions, search content in real time, and access specific sections of a session.
The streaming infrastructure ensures that sessions can be delivered in high quality across a wide range of devices. Energy-efficient encoding technologies are also used to support more resource-efficient video processing.
Results
Project Results:
The new platform fundamentally improved the way the European Parliament makes its sessions available digitally.
Citizens can access parliamentary sessions from virtually anywhere, either live or on demand. The intuitive interface makes it easier to navigate directly to individual speeches, select the desired language, and share relevant content through social media.
For journalists and social media teams, the platform provides new possibilities for real-time publishing. During an ongoing session, relevant speeches can be turned into clips and distributed immediately in the appropriate language. This enables faster and more efficient reporting while making parliamentary content easier to share across digital channels.
The European Parliament also benefits from more efficient internal content management. Through the integrated CMS, sessions can be organized automatically and enriched with metadata, reducing manual work and helping ensure that content is consistently prepared and delivered.
Benefits for the Client:
- Easier public access to live and on-demand parliamentary content
- Multilingual content delivery for an international audience
- Faster real-time creation and distribution of clips for journalists and social media teams
- More efficient content management through automated CMS workflows
- Scalable architecture designed to support future requirements
- A flexible technical foundation for continued development and expansion
The platform’s future-ready architecture makes it possible to expand the system and adapt it to new technical and operational requirements over time.
Additional Information:
G&L Systemhaus – Streaming Platform for the European Parliament
