Making the News : Make Internet TV

Hmmm...cool! MakeInternetTV (MITV) has almost the same name we do…! I do take that as a compliment!

From the Participatory Culture Foundation, makers of Miro, comes this guide / web site / wiki, with step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.





Very soon, they promise, this site will also feature short videos from experienced internet video publishers. If you're interested in sharing your expertise, visit the MITV wiki here and contribute to the following sections:

• Choose Your Equipment
• Shoot
• Edit
• License
• Publish
• Promote

Don't forget to check out their advice as to why video feeds are often superior to single videos. An worthwhile subject on its own!

Cybercast credit: Make Internet TV

Open Television Network at Your Service

Is brought to you courtesy of Philip Hodgett, an Aussie émigré of DigitalProductionBuzz.com fame. These days, however, he concentrates on his new ventures, which, in addition to OTN, include his software company Intelligent Assistance and consulting outfit Big Brains for Rent. Here is one busy man!



In his word, quoted from David Williams’s interview with him in Digital Video magazine:

“It’s another entry into digital distribution. Some would say we are late getting into that game, but I have problems with most of the existing offerings out there. What we are trying to do is create an unmediated marketplace between content owners and those who want that content. Pretty much every other system has somebody sitting there as a gatekeeper between the content and the consumer. They decide what gets on the system, and if you have just a few pieces of content you can’t get any traction with them. We want to democratize distribution the same way that production has been democratized over the past decade.”

So OTN is available to you FREE, to sell your show to viewers and for viewers who want the option of controlling their own programming. It is built on a new technology called klickTab.

You can use klickTab to sell audio and PDF content too through a standard RSS feed (a podcast feed) that can be loaded into iTunes, Miro or compatible RSS aggregators. Is that cool or what?

With your channel feed loaded, your viewers can preview, get, download, manage and view your programs in one piece of software. Viewers have options like iPods, AppleTV, and other applications to deliver their content to a big screen TV for the traditional television experience.

Does “Open” mean that my videos can be pirated away?

Both OTN and I believe that the way to combat piracy is to offer a simple, convenient and fair way to buy the content people want to watch. There will always be some piracy, a fact of life that we all must live with. It's also not clear that a "pirated" copy is really a lost sale (most often it is not), and whether or not the promotional value of the piracy is worth more than the potential sale. There are certainly some in "big media" who believe that, and evidence suggests that independents and new media also benefit from "piracy."

And Now Miro 1.0...from the Painter's Apprentices

Update, update to my post of August 16, 2007!!!

For a open source project, the Miro folks have been doing an amazing job. Here are the main features of Player 1.0, now officially off the beta threadmill:

* Watch Full Screen
Since Miro works so well for HD content, you'll find lots of video that looks beautiful in fullscreen on even the largest displays.

* Resume from Where You Stopped
Miro will remember where you stopped watching a video and will start at that point when you play it again.

* Play Almost Anything
Forget about the format wars. Miro can play MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format.

* One After Another
Set your Miro preferences to either play videos one after another (in the order they appear) or to play a video then stop. If you have Miro set to play videos one after another, you can always right-click on an individual video and have it play then stop.

Congrats and lots of luck!

“Democracy” Is Dead -- Long Live Miro

The Democracy Player has been relaunched today as Miro by the Participatory Culture Foundation.



Miro aims to make online video "as easy as watching TV", while at the same time ensuring that the new medium remains accessible to everyone, through its support for open standards. The open-source application combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. But why the name change?

According to last100, which has published a full review and guide to Miro:

"When Democracy Player launched back in February 2006, the feedback received was that the name evoked different, yet equally negative responses. For many Americans it conjured up an image of yet another left wing media project, and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. In contrast, the new name is purposely abstract."

Abstract? I guess in a sense the world famous Catalan painter, Miro’s style could be called abstract, since his paintings were surrealist. Little wonder, since Miró repeatedly expressed contempt for conventional painting methods and his desire to "kill", "murder", or "rape" them in favor of more contemporary means of expression.

In a sense they are right: iTV is as contemporary as it gets....