The future of TV: Democracy

Democracy Player is a new free video player and downloader that (given a decent broadband connection) gives the first gimpse I’ve see of the post-broadcast-tv world where you choose what you want to watch without it being painful to do the selection and downloading. Fabulous fun.

And just like TV, if you’ve got stuff downloaded, it just plays video clip after video clip. And downloads in the backgound and all that sort of goodness.

But that is not all. This comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation, the software is open source, and there are other tools to make it participatory:

• Broadcast Machine is used to make channels of your own videos and photos – and it makes distribution by BitTorrent really easy.
• Video Bomb is a collaborative filtering internet video site. The more bombs, or votes a video gets, the higher up the list it gets.

This is a nice set of tools. And it really does point the way to the future. Give us all lots of bandwidth and connections to anwhere in the world, and we no longer have to live with those few free-to-air channels. We have choice. And we can take part by making and adding our own channels. I like it.