petition: the council of the european union – lack of open standards

The Council of the European Union streams some of its meetings and press conferences online. Unfortunately, that streaming is done in Windows Media format. They barely support browsers other than IE, and then only on Windows and Mac OS X. If you don’t use IE on Windows, you get degraded functionality, and GNU/Linux is not supported because the people who run this service claim:

We cannot support Linux in a legal way.

Yeah, right. What a load of nonsense. I think they mean they don’t want to. There is a way for the Council to save a lot of money (licensing WMV for streaming is not cheap), and to be able to support any browser and any operating system for its viewers: switch to open standards. Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio would do very nicely. If the 23rd Chaos Communication Conference can do it, I’m sure the Council could too.

There’s a petition doing the rounds to ask the Council to do the right thing. Please sign it!