I must admit that I was intrigued when I happened across news that the Mozilla Foundation awarded a $100,000 grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation, the folks behind the open source Internet TV player, Democracy. Not so much by the award itself, but by the potential for Democracy to make some noise as the concept of InternetTV gathers steam. The key for Democracy (which is soon to be named Miro) is that it can fit into the way users access and disseminate content over the Web. It basically serves as a two way channel for consuming and producing. While YouTube has garnered its share of attention, is that as a centralized entity it serves to wrest a critical degree of creative control and ownership away from originating sources. Furthermore, it doesn't even address the fact individuals at the periphery should be granted the option of independently broadcasting visually driven content themselves.
I see Democracy, which integrates an RSS aggregator, a BitTorrent client, and VLC media player, as a significant step towards that end. Even if it isn't an end-all result. Plus, InternetTV fits in well with the emergence of and transition to non-traditional media outlets like blogs and podcasting, even if its dynamics are a bit more complicated. It is worth observing if Democracy can stimulate a solid push from its development community towards refining the project into a full-featured product. InternetTV as a medium might just be waiting for the type of application that it can eventually become, in order to explode into mainstream conciousness. Perhaps it's following in the footsteps of WordPress, as half-open source platform/half-catalyst for a pendulum shift? Who knows.
About the blogger: Alex Fletcher is lead industry analyst at Entiva Group Incorporated, a research and analyst firm which concentrates exclusively on the open source software industry. His main focus is working to help clients of all sizes formulate strategy and policy surrounding their use of open source software within the enterprise. Alex has prior experience as a consultant, software engineer and start-up founder. He can be reached at alex dot fletcher -at- entivagroup dot com.
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