All public information should be made available in both commonly used and open formats.
Access to public information must not be dependant on access to proprietary or expensive technology.
The Eu should support the open standards and the ue of free software. The EU are after all suposed to be for the free movement of services, goods and people.
This Streaming Service SHOULD be available to anyone, regardless of what computer system is used to reach it. Otherwise, it's of no use to the citizens.
Please justify your (extremely strange) decision. Why can you not 'support Linux in a legal way'? Many thousands of streaming media services can (and do) support Linux, with no legal issues whatsoever. Are you making excuses for technical incompetency?
In government systems closed standards which limit who can view material such as this, are discriminating and questions should be raised as to why this has been allowed to happen.
once again we can have doubt about independance of our institutions.
if you think microsoft way is the only legal way to stream video, perhaps it's time to change institutions.
I see no technical or legal reason for the Council's decision to restrict viewing of its sessions to Mac and MS Windows. The current ban places an unfair tax by a foreign corporation onto citizens of the EU.
I think merely on the grounds of sovereignty and self determination that the Council should change to an open format. The cost and other issues are even harder to justify.
The EU should support open standards. If the EU supports open standards, there is no need to support specific OSes, as all OSes are able to support open standards.
The EU should support fair trade, in all ways possible, this includes not forcing people to run operating systems that can deal with the closed WMV format.
google for 'theora' www.theora.org for an open alternative.
All public services should use open standards. It's a betrayal of trust, short sighted and immoral to require that citizens must be tied into a commercial companies systems (especially a convicted monopolists) in order to participate in their own government.
There are many ways to provide high quality video for free.
The EU should be using open standards, or if they do a vendor lock-in, at least pick a european vendor.
There is a secondary issue here: what they do here undermines the work of the Monopoly Commission. I suggest you send a copy of your petition action and complaint to them as well.
It is crucial that the EU, and any other governmental organisation, becomes platform-independent to maximise access for citizens, but should also promote free/libre software to minimise the cost of access for citizens.
