[Imc-aotearoa-video] Democracy Player, Broadcast Machine and VideoBomb

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

A have been excited about the Democracy Player  
(http://getdemocracy.com) since I heard a few weeks ago that a usable  
version is now available. I have tried version 0.85 on Windows and  
unfortunately it's still a bit patchy. At the this stage I couldn't  
honestly recommend it. However they are on the cusp of releasing  
version 0.9 which should be a big step forward and by the time they  
release version 1.0 it should be stable enough for even the most  
nervous user to give it a try.

Democracy Payer is being developed as part of a digital television  
platform (DTV) by a non-profit called the Participatory Culture  
Foundation. It is entirely free and open source which means it is  
accessible to anyone with a computer (PC or Mac) at no cost (free/  
gratis) but also that anyone can get the source code and modify it  
(free/ libre), contributing to development. Hopefully lots of  
programmers will get behind the project and it will improve rapidly.

PCF's DTV platform includes the Broadcast Machine which can be used to  
make your video files available for download as a bittorrent  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent) potentially allowing  
hundreds of thousands of users to download your video from your site  
*and* each other, reducing the load on your site's server and the  
amount of bandwidth consumed.

DTV also includes http://videobomb.com/, a site where you can set up  
your own internet tv channel which people can subscribe to using the  
DemocracyPlayer and other 'video podcast' software. VideoBomb doesn't  
host files, instead it allows you to point to files that exist  
elsewhere on the net (eg archive.org), including them in your channel.  
When someone subscribes to your channel they get a list of the videos  
you have pointed to. With Democracy Player they can either have them  
all downloaded automatically as they are added to the channel or  
choose the ones they are interested in.

At the moment I am trying to figure out how this whole system could be  
incorporated into Indymedia and I'd love to hear people's ideas.

RnB
Strypes

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