Internet TV, Free at Last! – OhmyNews International

Democracy is an open-source platform to watch video podcasts over the Net

Roberto Spiezio (seong)
Published on 2006-05-13 06:34 (KST)

Multimedia content is the most important pillar of the Internet area known as the Web. Companies from all over the world gain loads of money every year from sponsorships and on-line presence with their logos and websites. The market of on-line videos and TV has also improved. Nowadays, for example, all the major content providers, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN have a section of their portals dedicated to videos.

Although Internet TV is becoming more and more important, since it merges our TV-oriented mass culture with the Internet, our era’s killer application, it seems that only the “usual suspects” are exploiting the new opportunities afforded. Independent publishers, common people and other organizations appear excluded.

Enter the idea of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, this not-for-profit organization is made of ten people with a clean and enthusiastic look, but, most of all, with a precise project: to make Internet TV free at last, open, independent and available to anyone.

The open-source platform offered by PCF is quite comprehensive: from the production to the publication and sharing of the videos through the websites and the applications they have created : Democracy Player to watch, VideoBomb to share, Broadcast Machine to create and the Channel Guide to choose from the innumerable video podcasts and vlogs -video weblogs- available and covering any topic that might come to your mind: Animation, Movies, News, Politics and Technology, to name some. I have just been watching a video about the 2006 London Marathon. The applications’ code is freely available and released under GPL license.