[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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