It’s about time, but the European Parliament just got that little bit more accessible to us members of the great unwashed with today’s launch of EuroparlTV. With subtitles and voiceovers in 23 languages, initial impressions are good, though I can’t pretend to have played with it enough to have worked out the bugs as of yet.

It’s produced by the same company that are responsible for Sky TV’s braindead quiz Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old?, so they should know how simple these things need to be – nothing too fancy, nothing too complicated. Time will tell if their back-end is up to scratch, and whether the search function is intelligent enough to serve up the videos and information we need, but still – good effort (and props to blogging London Labour MEP Mary Honeyball for campaigning for something like this to come about

The reported annual budget of nine million euros is no doubt enough to get the anti-EU crowd up in arms, but considering the logistics of the thing and the general tendency towards massively inflated costs for governmental IT projects (the recent UK parliament redesign apparently setting us taxpayers back more than £3 million, and 10 Downing Street’s recent move to same free blogging software that runs this site setting us back £100k), that’s peanuts. And, though we’ll have to wait and see what the spin is and just how much unfiltered video will find its way online, though this may well be pro-EU propaganda (again, it’s too early to say for certain) it also can’t be denied that greater accessibility to information about the EU is good for all sides, pro or anti.

Sorry for the extended absence, by the way. Busy. Switzerland was aces, though, even if the weather was a little British: