A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and
recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than
ever before.

Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS
(so you can pull a "channel" of programming), BitTorrent (so you can
download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking
down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can
watch video no matter how it’s encoded). Combine that with Broadcast
Machine, a simple tool for publishing channels of video, and Videobomb,
a social video service a little like Digg or delicious, and you’ve got
a tremendously exciting development in democratic access to media.

Democracy has been available in beta for the Mac for months, but as
of today, Windows users can play along too (the Linux player is just a
little ways behind).

The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some
channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch
your video — it’s as easy as turning on a TV, but you can recommend
the videos you like to your friends, make channels of them and save
them.

What’s more, you can hack the player, the publisher, all of it — it’s
all free, open source software that’s ready for your code
contributions.

Democracy strikes the same balance that great free software
tools like Firefox achieve: an elegant, simple tool for everyone to
use; a powerful, active developer community that anyone can hack in.

By
Cory Doctorow