If you follow the UN for work, sooner or later you end up on UN Web TV, the UN's own streaming site for live and archived video of meetings, press conferences and stakeouts. It is genuinely useful, and a bit of a maze until you learn how it is put together. Here is how I actually use it.
What UN Web TV covers
The interface is available in all six official languages, and content is grouped into a handful of categories:
- Meetings & Events: what most people come for. General Assembly, Security Council, Human Rights Council, Economic and Social Council, Human Rights Treaty Bodies, the International Court of Justice, conferences, high level events and side events.
- Media: press conferences and media stakeouts (the short remarks officials and ambassadors give to reporters, often right after a Council meeting).
- UN Officials: the Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General.
- News & Features: interviews, messages, features.
The full tree is on the Categories page.
What it does not cover is closed meetings. Security Council consultations, informal consultations and plenty of expert committee sessions are closed, so there is simply no video.
Watching meetings live
The homepage shows what is on air under "Live Now", with "Previously" and "Coming up" on either side. For planning, the Live Schedule is better. It lists events day by day, and you can click through about a week either side of today. There are filters for category and city (New York and Geneva, plus wherever else something is being broadcast that week) and a time zone selector that defaults to Eastern Time (New York). If you are in Geneva or Nairobi, change that first.
Finished events show their running time, live ones carry a "Live" label. If you would rather get this by email, there is a sign up for a daily schedule.
Honestly, treat the times as a plan, not a promise. Meetings start late, get suspended, run over.
Check the UN Journal first
The Journal of the United Nations is the official daily programme of meetings, and it is where I start any day I am tracking something. For New York it lists each meeting by body with the time, room and meeting number ("10253rd meeting" for the Security Council, "27th plenary meeting" for the General Assembly), and it marks the ones that are closed. Meetings that are webcast carry a "Webcast" link. There are separate sections for Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna and the ICJ, a "Forthcoming Meetings" list, and a PDF of the whole day.
Two reasons the Journal is worth the extra click:
- "Closed" means no video. Don't go searching for a consultation that was never broadcast.
- The meeting number is your search key. It is the most reliable way to find the exact recording later.
Clicking into a meeting in the Journal also gets you the meeting documents, statements delegations have submitted, official records once they exist, and the press office's meetings coverage.
How the archive is organized
Every recording has its own page, with a URL like webtv.un.org/en/asset/k13/k13nj7w12p. Titles follow a fairly consistent pattern of topic, body and meeting number, for example "Kosovo - Security Council, 10250th meeting" or "Third Committee, 29th plenary meeting - General Assembly, 81st session".
Below the player you get:
- production date and video length
- the audio languages available
- topic and geographic tags, which are clickable
- a summary and description (for Council meetings this usually lists briefers and speakers in order)
- related documents, often the report under discussion, linked to the UN documents site
One thing that trips people up: a single meeting usually has more than one video. There is the full meeting, and then short clips of individual briefers. Search "10250th meeting" and you get both the full meeting at 2 hours 18 minutes and a 10 minute clip of the Special Representative's briefing. Check the running time before you settle on one.
Finding a specific meeting
If the meeting was this week, browsing works. Each body under Meetings & Events has its own page with recent videos (the Security Council one also splits by region). For anything older, use search. The search page has filters for date range, category, audio language, topic, geographic name, city and status, and you can sort by newest, oldest or relevance.
My routine:
- Get the meeting number from the Journal, or from the meeting record if you already have it.
- Search Web TV for the number as it appears in titles, like "10250th meeting".
- For the General Assembly and its committees, add the body name and a date range. Their meeting numbers restart every session, so "29th plenary meeting" on its own matches a lot of years.
- Open the result and confirm the date and length look right.
Searching by subject ("Haiti", say) also works, but you will wade through stakeouts and press conferences. The category filter cleans that up.
Audio channels: floor vs interpretation
Formal meetings are usually recorded with several audio tracks: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, plus one labelled "Original". You switch between them in the player settings. Original is the floor audio, each speaker in whatever language they actually used. The other six are simultaneous interpretation.
Interpretation is great for following along. But the UN's own interpretation disclaimer is blunt about it: only the audio in the original language is authentic, and where the interpretation or captions differ from it, the original prevails. So if you are quoting a delegate, use the Original track or the official record. There is more on this in UN official languages and interpretation.
What you can and can't easily do with a recording
Watch, link and share. Every page has share buttons and a copy link option.
Download transcripts and captions. Many meeting pages, though not all and not always right away, have a Download section with transcript and caption files in the six official languages. You accept the terms and pass a reCAPTCHA first. The page itself says the transcripts are automatically generated and may contain errors, so treat them as a convenience. The UN's separate UN Transcripts preview goes further for public meetings: transcripts per language channel, speaker names where it can identify them, and search that links to the exact moment in the video.
Download the video. I haven't seen a video download button on the public meeting pages. Broadcasters and producers are pointed to UN Audiovisual for Professionals (UNifeed and related services) and a Request for Footage form.
Republish it. Read the rules yourself before you do. The UN terms of use allow downloading and copying material for personal, non-commercial use, with no right to resell, redistribute or create derivative works, and they note that more specific restrictions can apply to particular material. The copyright page adds that news related material can be used with appropriate credit as long as the UN is advised, and points to UN Publications for permission requests. If it's commercial, ask first.
Cite it as the official record. Not really. The written meeting records are what count: a verbatim record (symbols with PV, like the S/PV series for the Security Council) or a summary record (SR), depending on the body, and some meetings get neither. The UN research guide on meeting records explains the system, and I go through the practical side in how to get a UN meeting transcript. Video is the fastest source. The written record is the one to cite.
From a Web TV link to a summary you can use
A UN Web TV meeting link is exactly what Sumletter takes as input. Paste the URL of the meeting page, and it downloads the video, transcribes it with AI speech recognition and writes an executive summary. You can translate the result into the six UN languages plus Turkish and German, ask your own questions about the transcript, and on the Professional plan and up get a country by country breakdown of positions and key statements. A typical meeting takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes.
Same caveat as the UN's own automatic transcripts: this is machine output, not the official record, and it can get names or figures wrong. Check anything you plan to quote against the floor audio or the meeting record.
The free trial covers one video, no credit card. After that it's Starter at $9.99/mo (4 videos, up to 2 languages), Professional at $29/mo (12 videos, all languages) or Enterprise at $99/mo (35 videos). If you have a meeting open in another tab, try it on that one.