Broadband multimedia information service for European parliaments

The paper presents a distributed broadband multimedia information service that is realised within the project EPRI-COM that is supported by the European Union within the ACTS program. The primary idea of the EPRI-COM information service is to provide in-depth information from the European parliament to the parliamentarians of Central and Eastern Europe supporting the integration process of these countries in the EU in this way. The technical basis of the EPRI-COM project is a novel network of media servers providing audio/video streams of high quality to a number of widely distributed clients. The server network and the EPRI-COM information service is managed by a distributed server management system presented in the paper. In the current phase of the EPRI-COM project, six parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the European parliament are connected to the EPRI-COM service