The other night at dinner, I was reflecting on the somewhat disappointing results to date of my family’s experiment to create a PC-based home media centre upstairs in our living room. So far we’ve mostly been plagued by hardware problems, network connectivity problems, TV resolution problems, yada yada. The whole goal of the exercise had been to give my family internet access upstairs in the house without having to have an additional computer station setup, and in so doing introduce them to the joys of user generated content. But since the experiment started after Christmas it has mostly been Dad, me, diddling around with cables and replacement parts.
This started to change recently – now my wife has a queue of requests for, ahem, Bittorrent, and for my birthday on Monday I entertained the crowd with some amusing clips from Youtube. But we really turned the corner last night with Democracy, an open source vodcast player by the brilliant folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation.
In brief, Democracy does for vodcasts what GReader does for blogs – makes it dead simple to subscribe and consume RSS fed video clips, and downloads them in the background so that if you set up the feeds correctly and leave it running, you can have a TV-like experience (except without all the crappy channels and the advertising.) Which I did last night, watching a bunch of episodes from the Jetset show (wow, do I feel old) MediaBerkman and Awakened Voice Learning Centre, who produce a series of screencasts on using various social software tools.
Yeah, I know, nothing that revolutionary here; the Mac guys are all scratching their heads and wondering “iTunes?” I hate iTunes, refuse to use it. So for me, this is the first time a really usable interface for finding and consuming vodcasts on a consumer device has presented itself to me. It’s free. It’s cross platform. It allows you to search Google video, Youtube, Blip.tv and revver directly from the interface, and, if you swing that way, will handle your torrents for you as well. Looks like the dream of tuning out the mass media without totally forsaking the upstairs TV may not be as dead as it first seemed. – SWL
edtechpost 
Sounds a lot like my experience at home 🙂 I also don’t really want to install iTunes (or Real Player).
See also Vuze: http://www.vuze.com/app
by the makers of the bitorrent app Azureus. Similar to youtube and democracy player.
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Doug, thanks for the reference. In checking it out right now, it seems like you have to pay for the content. Is that right?
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Hey Scott…have you checked out “Joost”…from the gang that brought you “Skype”…
I am in the same predicament with my gang as well…
Check it out – http://www.joost.com/
frank
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Hey Frank, I have Joost as well, but here’s what I think is the difference – Democracy is a true vodcasting client, allowing you to feed it any feed with video attached to it. In addition, it acts just as a ‘player’ for any other media you have, plus a torrent client. With Joost, my impression is that you are stuck with the channels they provide, and what they are doing is trying to harness a p2p computing model for a more conventional ‘TV channel/advertising’ model. There is still some stuff of interest in there, but it does not seem like the same thing as Democracy which is really ‘open.’
Cheers, Scott
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LOL, I hate iTunes tool, iPod is cool, but iTune gota be one of the most useless software out there….
Bittorrent gonna chew ur bandwidth! It also kills HD, so use a smaller (
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Sorry to hear you’ve had some problems setting things up the way you wanted, but thanks for watching JETSET. 🙂 You’re only as old as you feel. At least that’s what they tell me before they give me my medication.
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Thanks Steve! And for all you oldies out there (e.g. everyone over thirty) I HIGHLY recommend the JetSet show to you; much like Ze Frank’s The Show, it points to a future in which engaging content can be produced by a few talented people on the cheap, and a community built by engaging the ‘viewers’ as participants. It’s great stuff. If only our online courses could have a similar effect.
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[…] 2 May 2007 Democratizing Internet Video Posted by intersect under Education and Technology , Social Software It has been sometimesince my last post but what better topic to resume this blog then to comment on explosion of video on the internet and how this can be leveraged for educational purposes. A colleague from Canada whose blog I read occasionally has an interesting post on a video aggregator from getdemocracy.com. Democracy has produced a vodcast player that allows you to subscibe to internet video delivered via RSS. YouTube, GoogleVideo, blip.tv and the like have enabled millions to post their own content but little of it has any true value in a traditional educational setting. However, with the Democracy player imagine the possibiltities where web 2.0 meets the law school curriculum: there is currently a big push in law schools to better connect legal practice to teaching and learning so that students are more prepared for the practice of law when they leave law school. One way to supplement this effort may be to bring students into the courts to observe proceedings. Outside of clinical experiences and moot court students may never see the inside of a court room during their time in school. Enter court web casts. Several state courts record their proceedings and stream the video or audio to the web. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in fact webcasts oral arguments live and also provides an archive of past proceedings. With the Democracy player, one could find this video and in effect set up channels dedicated to real court room proceedings. Arguments could be analyzed, dissected, and discussed. Video allows one to not only study the merits of an argument but the body language and non-verbal communication that well-skilled practitioners wield so artfully. But alas, many of these courts do not provide their content via RSS so one is still required to manually check for new content. All in good time… […]
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