democracy player for internet video

The latest version of Democracy Player, an open Internet video program that’s as easy as a TV and as open as Firefox, has shipped today.

Democracy Player is developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit organisation, and uses free software and open protocols to let you subscribe to channels of video that come in over RSS (so you don’t have to keep checking to see if anything new is up) and using BitTorrent to download it. It plays any video format, offers 600 video channels viewable fullscreen in high resolution - as long as you have the bandwidth to support it.

from Boingboing “The upshot is something that’s almost too good to be true: an Internet video player that you don’t need to be a geek to use — or to publish for. Anyone can make a Democracy channel and you don’t need to have a big server to push it out. Thanks to BitTorrent, your hosting costs don’t go up whether you’ve got one subscriber or 10 million. The 0.9 release can tune in over 600 free channels being published by creative people all over the world. 0.9 adds support for Flash video, and comes (partially) translated into 30+ languages. It also supports drag-and-drop for individual video files, making it the only video player you need on your desktop.”