For the past year, Downhill Battle members, including me, have been working really hard on internet software that we think has a serious chance at overturning the corporate monopoly on mainstream media. We were serious about taking the chance to be in charge of our own media, so we started an organization called the Participatory Culture Foundation.
This week we launched Democracy and our Get Democracy website — a free, open source internet television platform that makes watching and broadcasting videos on the internet into an elegant experience. Democracy is quality, quality, quality — it is made up of RSS for making channels and video delivery, VLC to play almost any format, Mozilla because it rules, and Bit Torrent integration for extreme file transfer and no bandwidth costs.
Democracy is designed to establish tv on the internet as an open and free format for everybody — you can make a channel, broadcast your work at zero cost, and let the full screen videos come flowing in. It is now possible for independent videomakers (and musicians) to broadcast their videos on a level playing field with current mainstream media companies, which means that as a viewer, the choice of what to watch is yours to make.
Democracy is simple to use, you simply subscribe to the channels you want, and high quality, full-screen videos come to you, kind of like Tivo. Go to Get Democracy to download the player and help secure that internet tv stays open and becomes the best it can be. You can also check out a t-shirt with a sparrow on it, we gots cool new store operations, etc.
Thanks to everyone who helped this year and congratulations to our developers. Thanks D and D.