Get Democracy

I ran across a cool tool in Wired the other day. Democracy is an open-source Internet TV platform. In other words, it's a video player that will download videos from the web. Recently a whole slew of people (how many people are a slew anyway???) have been creating videos and video blogs (vlogs). For example, Rocketboom is a vlog that covers news of interest to technology lovers the world over. Democracy is a fantastically simple video player that will, if you wish, automatically download new episodes of vlogs that you're interested in. Users can setup channels which other users can then subscribe to. If you're looking for comedy, politics, cooking, or a host of other topics then Democracy may be a good way to find it.

Democracy can, with a little work, also be used with TvRSS and FeedReader to automatically download shows of interest via BitTorrent. Obviously this poses some copyright questions; however, it provides an Internet based DVR without having to subscribe to a cable service. I certainly wouldn't advocate dumping cable just yet but this is certainly an exciting use of existing technologies that may pave the way to the future of television.