[The Innovators - Nicolas Reville Participatory Culture Foundation Part 2 of 3]
[When will we see a non-beta Democracy Player?]
We think we have maybe two or three more incremental releases before we go to 1.0
and the things that we're really focusing on now are speed and memory use.
We want to improve speed and reduce memory use
We want to add a few more features that will help people organize things
add a lot of interface polish, good right click menus,
all the little bits and pieces that make an application
something that you really enjoy using on a day-to-day basis.
And then beyond that we probably, you know, we already have in mind
probably at least a year's worth of features
that we want to continue to add and improve to the product,
things like being able to publish from within the application,
syncing to ipods and other video players being able to burn to CDs
be able to generate thumbnail images for videos automatically, things like that
So we think that there's -- we have a long way to go
in terms of just getting Democracy Player to really be where we imagined it
but we're definitely hitting a point now
where it's something people can use everyday,
is really useful for people and we think it really offers
the best online video experience that exists.
It can be really high quality stuff, it's there when you want to watch,
it's an easy to use interface and it helps you keep everything organized.
[How does Democracy compare to other video platforms?]
Well I think that, you know, within the the category of software, desktop software
that does something similar to Democracy PLayer,
iTunes and FireAnt are definitely the most similar to us
and iTunes does support video podcasting,
though the interface is really designed for audio podcasting
and it is limited in a lot of ways, and they don't support BitTorrent,
they support a very limited number of video codecs,
And so FireAnt is really the most similar product to ours.
I -- you know, we really support what they're doing,
they're a small group of activists that really care about their work,
they have, are really passionate about video blogging
and we think that's wonderful.
[Where is online video heading?]
I think it's hard to predict exactl how things are going to play out
our goal is more focused on giving people a way that they can get their message out
and something that's open, that's free for everybody to use
that's free to publish to that's free to watch.
And so we really want to empower those individuals, small groups
that might not have been able to get onto mainstream media in the past,
to be able to do that, to reach a worldwide audience,
high quality stuff, and without having to have deep pockets in order to do that.
I think that we're going to see huge changes
in how the internet affects traditional media
and I'm sure that what we're doing will be a part of that
but I also think that media companies have shown
that they're very flexible and adaptive
and I think you'll see a lot of them, we already have seen a lot of them
coming into this space and competing along with everybody else
[Will online video clog the internet tubes?]
I think bandwidth is extremely important, especially for small publishers
and it's important to us that any publisher be able to get their video out
and as high quality format as they want to as many people as they want
and not have money be a limit to how well you can get your message out
So a first step to accomplishing that is our support of BitTorrent,
which lets people share the bandwidth
among everybody who's watching something
and that really can dramatically reduce the amount of bandwidth costs,
and combined with some free services, I think you'll see
that that becomes really possible
for people to reach a lot of a lot of people around the world
with almost no out-of-pocket expenses.
If video keeps going the way it's going,
there there may be an Internet-wide problem with bandwidth
which is that bandwidth which has been
getting cheaper and cheaper could start to become a more scarce resource
if everybody's downloading hundreds of megabytes of video every day
but I think that, and I'm certainly not at all an expert
on these kinds of things, but my sense is
that Internet service providers and other people like Google
and other people that own big parts of the Internet backbone
will find ways of caching and sharing out video in a way
that will help ease some of those bottlenecks.
So I think it's I think that that's going to be a very solvable problem.
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