Ashton Mills04 June 2007, 2:15 AM
The popular web TV culture aggregator, which is struggling to be the future of mass media video, got a boost recently with a hefty donation to its cause courtesy of the Mozilla Foundation to the tune of $US100,000. Now that's a lot of TV.
I looked at the Democracy player
last year covering this innovative take on new and mass market and media.
And I'm not the only one impressed by its culture-driven content. Seth Bindernagel, leader of Mozilla's Community Program, has announced in his blog the donation of the Mozilla Foundation to the Participatory Culture Foundation (the organisation behind Democracy) of $US100,000 to support the cause.
Mozilla's Community Program aims to support individuals, projects or organisations associated with the Mozilla Foundation or otherwise share a similar vision (prior donatees include Creative Commons).
Seth states the reasons for the donation to be:
1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web.
2. They’re building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI — and it’s based on Mozilla technology.
3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for…they don’t have any venture backing, they’re running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.
Which is all rather honorable. In fact, I think it's excellent for Mozilla to be sharing its wealth this way, and no doubt it will help boost the already aspiring culture aggregator that Democracy already is.
And on that note, as Seth outlines, Democracy will soon be named Miro -- supposedly to distance itself from connotations of government or politics, which the player has nothing to do with (though you might consider philosophy a different matter). Apparently far too many people (really, far too many for what you'd hope is a resonably intelligent net-savvy population -- and yes, that's an oxymoron) were getting confused. So Miro it is.
For now, the www.getdemocracy.com homepage is still the place to grab the player, but it will soon be moving to www.getmiro.com.
And if you're new to the world's first web-TV culture aggregator, the one line summary would be a multi-platform integrated podcast client, video player and bittorrent client in one, teamed with ancillary services like Videobomb and Broadcast Machine to share your favourite shows and even publish your own.
If you're not already using it, give it a whirl. And for a sample of the type of shows you can find, subscribe to and watch with it see our previous coverage of it here.
 Democracy player: The service boasts high-def content too. Source: getdemocracy |