Following the tide of video-blogs that have been popping up all around the net comes progressive video portals; websites that collect and distribute alternative media views. Zed TV, ourmedia.org, Participatory Culture Foundation’s Broadcast Machine, and Independent World Television are four sites/projects that I’ve been interested in.
» Zed TV has been around the longest, I believe, and is a really well done site on top of an already well designed project. From their site:
“ZeD is a launch pad for independent creative expression that uses TV and the Web to seek out and broadcast the best new short films, videos, animation, visual art, performance and music in Canada and around the world.”
» Ourmedia, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, offers free storage and hosting for video, audio, image and text files. Currently in alpha, the site is home to 23,000 grassroots members, and is growing steadily each day. From their site:
“Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We’ll host your media forever — for free.”
» The Participatory Culture Foundation’s Broadcast Machine is a software package aimed at the curation and delivery of online video content, kind of like video feeds via RSS. Using their DTV client, a user can subscribe to video channels, have the latest videos automagically downloaded in the background, and then watch the playback via the DTV software. From their site:
“Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management.”
» Independent World Television is a new organization looking to utilize the power of the web and an international audience to report on what is *really* going on in the world. Not limited to the web, IWT is also looking for satelitte and digital tv delivery. The process, planning, and mission of IWT are very transparent, something I think FSTV could benefit from (doing the same, that is). I’m really looking forward to seeing how they grow and progress in the future.
What would be even better would be to add Free Speech TV to this list, and we are exploring ways of delivering video content to our audience. Not just the content we show on channel 9415, but content from around the web, content submitted to us from viewers and community members. I know the Real Media/Real Player format doesn’t please many, but we will probably always retain this set-up for streaming purposes (I do hear good things about Darwin Streaming Server though). As we look to expand video content and explore new broadcast mechanisms, we will begin to offer other formats, namely mpeg4. We are currently experimenting with the preview release of the Broadcast Machine, and I’d like to point anyone interested to a recent blog post on the PCF blog: Political Activism with Broadcast Machine.