Nicholas Reville of The Participatory Culture Foundation, II

The Technology Evangelist team recently had a chance to sit down with Nicholas Reville from the Participatory Culture Foundation, creators of Democracy Player. In the second of this three part series we talk about where Democracy is going from here.

[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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