Download Squad

We mentioned DTV a couple of times before, and what caught my eye wasn't another video content aggregator, it was the surrounding toolset that had been developed to fill that aggregator with usable content (more on this in a moment). DTV is now Democracy player, and there is now a Windows version. Just like the iPod had to become Windows compatible to achieve critical mass, perhaps now Democracy player will become much more popular than other aggregators. Why am I hoping this? Why such a big fan of this odd little group known as Participatory Culture? As I said earlier, it's not about the player, it's the tools to support the player. So they created a player, and it works quite well, but they also have a website for sharing your videos without the player. There's a channel guide built in to Democracy player, like the iTunes music store. But the most critical component is Broadcast Machine. While I don't see the ability to add hyper links, which I felt was a killer feature, there are all sorts of great things about it still. The most powerful is, once again, being able to easily graft video content together and publish it auto magically.

There's other stuff to love about Participatory Culture and their work: namely, their apps are GPL'ed, and they are a nonprofit, whose apparent only goal is to put the means of distributing video content on the web into the hands of as many people as possible. Note that Democracy player is not yet a full 1.0 release (it's 0.8 right now), and the Windows version lags in the features department (no rewind or full screen). Still, I love their focus, and the tools are good, so let's get to clogging up that Internet with kooky videos, shall we?