The Participatory Culture Foundation on Wednesday announced the launch of Democracy, an open source Internet TV system that the group describes as “TiVo for Web video.” The free player is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows operating systems.
Democracy combines Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, BitTorrent and video blog technology to enable users to subscribe to and watch full screen video on their computer. A built-in channel guide helps you navigate the content that is available.
Democracy is more than just a video player; it’s an entire Internet television platform that also enables users to turn their videos into an Internet TV channel, and provides programmers with open source code offered under the Gnu Public License. “Broadcast Machine,” for example, is PHP-based software that you install on your Web site to publish video files and create Internet TV channels. The service also features “Video Bomb,” a community-rated shareable guide.
Today’s public launch marks the release of the Democracy player for Windows, but the Mac OS X version is also available, as a version 0.8 beta.