Brussels, 12/04/2010 (Agence Europe) - The COPEAM (the Permanent Mediterranean Audio-visual Conference), which held its 17th meeting on 8-11 April, under the auspices of the INA (Institut de l'audiovisuel français) said it had achieved all it had hoped: “all the Euro-Mediterranean countries were represented”, and launched a collective call for support for a “Mediterranean channel, the first Mediterranean television channel, multi-cultural and multilingual, broadcast by satellite to the whole of the Euro-Mediterranean area”. This channel would put out programmes from all the countries, south and north. The COPEAM says that, as things stand, there is no medium, neither television, internet nor mobile telephony, entirely dedicated to the Mediterranean. Yet this is a region of 770 million inhabitants, with common histories and cultures. Setting up a multi-cultural, multilingual television channel would, it says, send a strong signal and would be an excellent way of promoting peace and cultural exchange between the peoples of the region, who still, too often, co-exist without really knowing one another and whose audiovisual scene remains highly partitioned. (F.B./transl.rt)