KEY POINTS:
The live webcast of Parliament began yesterday, costing $4 million to set up and watched at its busiest by up to 350 people at any one time, according to monitoring of the website's traffic.
Here is the latest selection of Your Views:
Kay
If Parliament will
Steve
My thoughts about this are along the same lines as Tim's comments below. $4 million to set that up is, on the face of it an extraordinary sum. If I to set up a similar service at my workplace, so web users can view my employees working live on the internet and I was quoted $4 million I would be truly blown away. About 10-15k sounds reasonable to me to get this up and running, hosted and maintained. Not $4 million.
Stuarts-burgers
I would love to be able to watch our employees at work but I can not. It seems that those of us who make the choice to use Open Source Software are being locked out. I made a choice to use Fedora and at present it seems that neither the Mircosoft and the Apple video players, that are needed to watch our employees in action, will function with my choice of Operating System. Maybe we need to look at other parts of the world to see how they have adopted Open Source Software.
Gabriel Pollard
I watched parliament live yesterday, it wasn't boring. I watched it for around three hours (while doing other stuff) and some of it made for good watching. I won't watch it all the time as the current state of television is better than what politics can offer me.
Veterannz (Timaru)
I am pleased to be able to view Parliament live. I listen to Parliament frequently but reception here is dismal. I think it's wrong that NZ citizens don't have the best possible audio of parliament in all areas of NZ. This goes a long way towards it.
Blair Anderson
The publication of this public interest story is ill-served by the hard copy media's continuing contrite attitude the story's regarding extension to the internet. It is woeful that the key information missing from the story was, yes, you guessed it, the web address.
pCb - Auckland
I thought surely this is a joke . Then little Mickey Cullens comments made it all the more funny - his request that the almighty protect them from getting caught out is a comment suitable for satire in itself. If our representatives want to be thought of in the same way as highly paid executives and not the buffoons they regularly show themselves to be then it's in their hands. Don't try and control the press to limit what in their eyes must be an uncomfortable truth.
PD
Do they really expect me to sit and watch this, the ultimate insult to my intelligence? Yeah right!
Tim @ R1
4 million to set up a webcam feed and a couple of other things. Huge waste of taxpayers money and theres got to be a conflict of interest somewhere there because these things can be set up for a nanofraction of 4 million dollars. Even if it cost $10000 I would still consider this high. I would be very interested to see who setup the website and where the money was spent.
Ray Eyre (Whangarei)
Watch parliament on TV? God forbid that I should ever become so bored and pathetic that I would watch any of our politicians on TV. If I want to see the happenings of parliament all I need do is look next door to the local kindergarten, The actions are the same.Parliament set up its own TV cameras so they could edit out the childish rubbish. How is this being transparent?