G&L Geißendörfer & Leschinsky has developed a next-generation streaming platform for the European Parliament.
The new system enables seamless live and on-demand content distribution in multiple languages, allowing speeches and debates to reach audiences across Europe more efficiently than before, according to the German provider of streaming and media technology solutions.
The European Parliament needed a highly flexible and scalable solution to meet its multilingual streaming demands. Hundreds of staff members required the ability to clip live video from ongoing sessions and share them across various platforms in different languages. G&L responded by designing a modular hybrid infrastructure that blends on-premises and multi-cloud technologies, ensuring high availability and scalability while maintaining environmental sustainability.
The platform supports live streaming with 30 video channels, each carrying up to 32 audio tracks, and distributes content via the Akamai Content Delivery Network. It can send streams to as many as 200 destinations, including social media platforms, making parliamentary speeches and discussions easier accessible. The system is also optimised for efficiency, utilising energy-efficient encoders powered by ARM-based CPUs from Ampere and ASIC-accelerated hardware from NETINT for real-time transcoding, according to G&L.
A security framework underpins the platform, incorporating ISO 27001 certification, zero-trust identity management and DDoS protection. The Kubernetes-based hybrid infrastructure ensures flexible orchestration of workloads, while advanced analytics from Bitmovin and CMCD-enhanced CDN logs provide real-time insights into streaming performance and user engagement. Long-term archiving capabilities allow the management of more than 89,000 videos from 21,000 events, ensuring that parliamentary content remains accessible for future reference.
The platform’s versatility is a key strength, serving multiple use cases within the European Parliament, according to G&L. Live broadcasts are available on the Parliament’s websites with up to 32 audio channels per stream, while a built-in ring buffer provides seven days of storage for recent content. Social media teams can select and share specific moments in different languages during live events. For example, an editor can stream an entire debate with original French audio on Facebook, while another shares a Spanish-language excerpt on LinkedIn, and a third posts a Latvian segment on X/Twitter, allowing up to 200 unique streaming combinations at once.
Members of Parliament can also clip their own speeches in real time and instantly share them in their preferred language on social media or download them as MP4 files. This capability empowers lawmakers to communicate directly with their constituents, enabling greater engagement and transparency, according to G&L.
