Saw this today at lwn.net and thought it is timely given SFD. Democracy player 0.9 Last February, the Participatory Culture Foundation announced its existence with the launch of the "Democracy" player, billed as "the world's first comprehensive open source Internet TV system." Many Linux users may be excused for not trying out the program at that time; despite being a GPL-licensed program, Democracy had not been ported to the Linux platform. That situation has now changed; on September 11, Democracy 0.9 was announced. It runs on Linux, and packages for Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, and Ubuntu are provided; the source is available for everybody else. Beyond the Linux port, this version promises a polished user interface, a new playlist capability, Flash video support, and more. Your editor clearly had no choice; a tool like this simply must be tried out. Unfortunately, the Democracy experience is still rather spotty at best. It requires the installation of a number of proprietary codecs (which is not particularly surprising, once one thinks about it - the Democracy developers will have no magic solutions there). The system can be sluggish to respond, and your editor never was able to get it to display a video in its own window. It also would not explain why it failed to display anything, so there was little to be done about it. But your editor was able to get far enough to realize one important thing: video display is not really what Democracy is about in the first place. This tool is really a sort of video feed aggregator for free video content; it has all the required features around sorting feeds into categories, collecting votes for interesting videos, using BitTorrent to download videos in a provider-friendly way, and more. There is also significant support for people who want to create their own video feeds. What Democracy and its supporting foundation are trying to do is to get as many people as possible into the business of creating and distributing interesting content. The term "Internet TV" is somewhat off the mark - Democracy will suit couch potatoes just fine, but its real purpose is to get them off their couches and participating in the process. It is trying to create a world where video content is free, universal, and compelling - so it has tools for finding and distributing videos but a distinct lack of DRM support. This is an important goal - television is too important to leave to the TV companies. If the Democracy system can help to bring more free content into existence, it will have done good thing. Some progress in that direction has been made: there are, it is said, some 600 channels of free content available now, and, doubtless, more to come. The current code has real promise; it looks like a capable system for discovering, distributing, and managing interesting video content. If they can get past the remaining troublesome issues, the Democracy hackers will have created a valuable tool indeed.