Democracy Player: This Is What Democracy Looks Like

10:30 AM Mar 14, 2006

One of the hottest projects occurring in the DIA community comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation.

Democratizing video.

As the Internet's ontology recapitulates mass media's phylogeny, citizen-level media has marched in a few years from Gutenberg to Tesla to John Logie Baird. And now, suddenly, you wake up in the age of UHF and you're Weird Al Yankovic.

The Foundation's amazing, open-source Democracy Player had a deservedly ballyhooed release a couple of weeks ago. What is it? Call it TiVo on your computer and you won't be far off. Here's BoingBoing's description:

Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a "channel" of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it's encoded).

It has a quality analogue in Fireant and a couple other projects; what sets Democracy apart as much as the beautiful, standards-driven technology are its siblings: VideoBomb and Broadcast Machine allow anyone to "roll your own tv" -- that is, make and share your own channels at the easy-entry, viral level of blogs and podcasts.

Ever thought you could put a better product on the air than Rupert Murdoch? Hey, you've got 24 hours to fill. (Multibillion dollar budget and unrelenting commitment to regressive social change ... not so much.)

Grab the player. Dip your toe in, perhaps with Jesse Newland's step-by-step guide for using Democracy to automatically stream new episodes of your favorite programs. You, like him, might wonder why you're still paying your cable bill. Maybe you'll even wonder which side of the camera you belong on.

Update:  Personal Democracy Forum has a report on the tool's explosive growth.

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