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In 10 years, internet television is the major content source in the world. While projects like FreeVo and MythTV provide open DVR functionality, I think the future of television lies more in projects like Democracy (although it's a desktop app) and ToxTox, which aims to be an open internet television "browser". Just like Firefox did, I hope projects like these will open up the walled gardens of settop boxes.

"Try Pidgin. I find it much more usable than Gaim, atleast in the UI features."

FYI, Pidgin is the new name for (and version of) Gaim :)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread .php?t=544498
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/04/07/2014230.s html

"Announced on the Gaim mailing lists earlier today, the Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM."

And BTW, the Democracy Player is going to be renamed to Miro for the 1.0 release:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/06/democracy -player-096-released-last-version-ever-before-name -change/

It is based on vlc I think.

• Play Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more
• Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog.
• Download and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and other sites.
• Watch HD videos on your computer screen (high-def display)
• and more ...

I like the YouTube idea, but even that has its caveats. It would be nice if they set up a feed for the Democracy Player. That could be less prone to external influences (if they'll take down a video of a car crash because the state of New Jersey asks them to, what's to stop Venezuela from requesting YouTube pull a video for being critical of the government?)

democracy in svn runs fine on feisty

blog post:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/04/feisty-su pport-on-the-way/
how to get/build from svn:
https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/demo cracy/wiki/GTKX11BuildDocs

[AC because having an account here would encourage me to post more]

Here, may be should update Wikipedia.

http://www.getdemocracy.com/news/2007/03/a-name-ch ange/

There is (was) an RSS feed which I used with DemocracyTV to watch The Show. Sure beat a little video window in the browser. However, I don't think the feed became available until sometime after the half way mark in the life of The Show ... Ze must have changed his tune a little from the initial website-only policy.

"I will be waiting for ... videos produced by amateurs"

Then you should check out Democracy (internet TV program):
http://www.getdemocracy.com/

Um, Democracy Player?, cross platform, integrates bitorrent and VLC. Plays anything, automatically caches torrents, sweet GUI, zero configuration. All you have to do is download the installer run it and select or provide channel feeds. Search for content, get a listing and click the download arrow. When the file is ready just click on the listing and it plays. Doesn't get simpler than that!

Already does this in a decentralized fashion w/o the DRM. Check it out http://www.getdemocracy.com/.

Of course Bob's saying that this is going to not be DRMed. So if Apple is sending me pre-release videos which aren't DRMed without my consent, how do they charge me for it? If Suncoast did this via fedex they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when they billed me.

Or you could Get Democracy - open source, downloads to your machine, supports YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and more...

Sounds like Democracy. Except Democracy is an open platform (I assume this new thing will not be).

MS Patent covers a central system that will be responsible for aggregating various feed formats (RSS, Atom, RDF) and provide a common interface to other programs for using the feed information. Availability of several feed formats and the errors in them makes a nightmare for the applications that need to use feeds. So a common system will be helpful. Several parsers available today to parse RSS and Atom feeds. The most popular one is Universal Feed Parser parses all known web feeds and presents, feed data in usable form that can be used by the application developers. UFP is part of popular open source feed based applications like Planet Feed reader and Democracy Player. So Microsoft's patented process is nothing new. Most of it can be claimed as prior art.

Also Read
Niall Kennedy's wonderful analysis of the MS feed patent.
Blog post by Microsoft Program Manager Lead for RSS Sean Lyndersay defending this patent.

What about Democracy Player and their Broadcast Machine? We've been able to do this ourselves for some time now.

What about Democracy Player and their Broadcast Machine? We've been able to do this ourselves for some time now.

PCF, which makes Democracy Player, is hiring developers:

http://www.getdemocracy.com/jobs/

Telecommuting is ok.

Try the newer versions of eix, they can search in layman overlays (also, eix is much quicker than emerge -s)

$ eix democracy
* media-tv/democracy
          Available versions: ~0.9.0.2[1] ~0.9.1[1] ~0.9.1[2]
          Homepage: http://www.getdemocracy.com/
          Description: Democracy is a free and open internet TV platform.

* media-video/democracy [3]
          Available versions: ~0.8.2
          Homepage: http://www.getdemocracy.com/
          Description: Democracy is a free and open internet TV platform.

[1] (layman/sabayon)
[2] (layman/sunrise)
[3] (layman/zugaina)

Found 2 matches.

Try the newer versions of eix, they can search in layman overlays (also, eix is much quicker than emerge -s)

$ eix democracy
* media-tv/democracy
          Available versions: ~0.9.0.2[1] ~0.9.1[1] ~0.9.1[2]
          Homepage: http://www.getdemocracy.com/
          Description: Democracy is a free and open internet TV platform.

* media-video/democracy [3]
          Available versions: ~0.8.2
          Homepage: http://www.getdemocracy.com/
          Description: Democracy is a free and open internet TV platform.

[1] (layman/sabayon)
[2] (layman/sunrise)
[3] (layman/zugaina)

Found 2 matches.

You could use an overlay: http://www.getdemocracy.com/downloads/gentoo.php

- on the PopSci.com website because they're encoded with proprietary codecs... When will web designers decide to publish using open formats? I'm straying from the topic, but is there a favorite video format for us to rally around? Flash is nice, but also proprietary - has anyone used the Democracy Player http://www.getdemocracy.com/?

I am not sure of the logistics you require but I though I would take the oppurtunity to promote this program I ran across the other day. Its not v1 quality yet but its very promising.

Streaming video with DVD-like controls, on-screen menus of preset channels, and interactive tools to share video playlists are only the beginning.

Oh, you mean like Democracy TV already has?

I think everyone here at Slashdot recognizes the dangers that these new DRM-infested devices are introducing into modern culture, and I think we can all agree that we would prefer companies to stop producing products that restrict our freedom.

Imagine what would happen if a company produced a portable MP3 and video player, similar to the Zune, that had P2P WiFi-connectivity, a BitTorrent client and possibly a scaled-down version of the Democracy Player . This might just cause the RIAA and MPAA to lose the ability to monitor file sharing and make it impossible to stop (unless the RIAA hires a bunch of thugs to sit in every subway car and bus across the country).

I call on us to figure out how to produce such a device. We need to send a message to companies like Apple, Microsoft and Sony that we will not accept devices broken by DRM.

Is anyone out there interested in helping to start a project to build and open-source piece of hardware to accomplish this?

If I understand right, Fox bought Myspace and YouTube, or Myspace bought YouTube and Fox bought Myspace or some damn thing. Point is, what is Fox going to do with its collection of media. Follow the lead of Warner I hope. And why did Warner deal with YouTube instead of rolling out it's own service (lots of eyeballs good for media companies) or partnering with Google's video service or buy something like Blip.tv.
[tinfoil hat]I think something might be going on here[/tinfoil hat]
Yeah, I know it's Warner music and Fox is mostly non music, but still they have gots ons of stuff rotting away in vaults somewhere, you would think earning something from it would be easier than trying to sue/arrest/pester/etc. people for distributing stuff no longer on the air.



Get a curse for your web site

All it needs now is an "auto client" that you just give it the URL of the automatically created website and it will automatically download anything new that arrives (that's a lot of "auto" going on ;-) That way I could go around to all of my families computers and set them up with the software and then just leave it alone. Every once in a while they can look in the "Home Videos" folder for new videos....

Sounds like Democracy player.

There is already the Democracy Player.
http://www.getdemocracy.com/
It uses all the right buzz words but didn't seem so great when I tried it.

Podcasts and video podcasts are now being used in several new open source apps that allow independent journalist shows, the foremost being the Democracy player. You get Media Matters for America, Democracy Now!, MediaRights, Willie Nelson (!!), ActiveFreeMedia, the Echo Chamber Project, N.O. TV, and more.

The player is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Never mind. The whole thing is out of date already anyway. With Linux broadcatching apps like Democracy Player and KatchTV and Penguin TV, there's really no need to look at those sites again. Just run an app, and choose a show to watch :)

But then again, we had Gopher, not Google, so I'll shut up.

Anyway, off the top of my head, Democracy player is a combination video player, RSS reader and torrent client that hooks up a community of legal (well, most of it) video distribution.

It was also announced this week that Steven Soderbergh will be releasing a short through BitTorrent. (I'll let you find the link, you hard working student.)

no democracy, well at least no effective one, but you can
stay out of US and still see it in fullscreen

http://www.getdemocracy.com/walkthrough/index13.ph p

It's still in beta, and it runs slowly on my Mac, but the way you can subscribe to channels or just download individual shows/clips is pretty cool. Could this be the future of TV? It's not really on-demand; it's more like demand-then-wait-for-download, but you get better video quality than most streaming solutions. I'd be curious to know what people think of this idea.

Well, not a specific place, but you could install Broadcast machine on your server if you wanted to do that.

Instead of giving time to this obvious "we can't make a good player so lets offer AOL free servers so they use our format only" lame game, try this:

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

At least they offer some stuff AOL/TW can't dare to air. Oh, not porn :)

There is an alternative. Democracy Player lets you subscribe to podcasts/vodcasts, downloads the latest episodes, and shows them to you in TV channel format. It's very cool, and it comes with lots of free channels of surprisingly high-quality content. If you really want your cable shows on the computer too, you can add them from an RSS-enclosed bittorrent feed :)

I guess it would make more sense if we play less because we are sharing our bandwidth thereby help bring down the distrubution cost.

One more way is the create your own internet television using platforms like http://www.getdemocracy.com/ where the user doesnt have to pay anything to view and one could make money based on advertisements. The cost of distrubtion woulld be low because the users are sharing their bandwidth.

Broadcast Machine, which is designed to dovetail with Democracy player. Broadcast Machine allows anyone to publish video affordably using BitTorrent or HTTP, with an easy, blogging-like interface. Broadcast Machine is software for websites, so you'll need your own web server on which to install it.

Maybe it's old news, but I saw it first two days ago:

Democracy - Internet TV Platform

Out of curiosity (it's not like I watch much TV anymore, anyway) I'm giving it a try right now. Can't say much about the contents yet (about three hundred something channels right now, some look like video podcasts, some other apparently not working). On the strictly technical side, seems to work.

Should we tell Cringely? ;-)