European Parliament’s TV Channel with 830 Viewers Costs £26 Million

A TV channel for the European Parliament, which has only 830 viewers a day, costs £7 million a year.

EuroparlTV shows parliamentary conferences and committee sittings and also educational video recordings to MEPs and staff, according to the Sun.

The channel started its operation in 2008 and so far it has cost £26 million. Most of the shows telecast on the channel are translated into 22 languages, including Irish, which is spoken by around 80,000 people.

The channel was labeled by critics as "an expensive joke" and "a propaganda tool."

"Taxpayers will be furious. It's a ridiculous amount of money to spend. People will be furious that EU bureaucrats are demanding ever more money at the same time as wasting it indulging their vanity with a TV channel. This is an expensive joke," TaxPayers' Alliance director Matthew Sinclair said.

Taxpayers pay £53,000 per hour whenever the channel airs programmes. The latest programmes shown on the channel are magazine news on Europe's life and culture, a report on Ukraine and the parliamentary round-ups for the coming weeks.

New Direction - The Foundation For European Reform, a think-tank, revealed the figures and also showed that EuroparlITV has only 16,148 subscribers.

"This is nothing more than a propaganda tool. The man in the street is living in desperate financial times - but ivory-towered EU bureaucrats continue to spend, spend, spend our money," the deputy leader of the UK Independence Party said.

"Alarmingly, the EU spends more than 2.4 billion euros every year on biased information campaigns to promote itself," he added.