3 Comments

MacMondays: Democracy

July 24, 2006 by in Apple with 3 Comments

Democracy Player

While we’ve previously covered Democracy Player / DTV, I feel their latest software release is definitely worthy of another mention. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the software, here’s a little introduction:

"There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice.

Download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide."

As a video podcaster, I’ve been watching Democracy grow as an IPTV delivery platform over the past year, and I must say I’m incredibly impressed. Democracy has developed into a much more stable, feature-packed application, and it’s definitely a pleasure to use. You also get a great sense of satisfaction knowing you’re using an application crafted together by a group of developers who really care about what they’re doing, and who are really trying to make a difference to media around the world.

That’s exactly why I’m so impressed that over 10% of macTV viewers are using Democracy already – an incredible achievement. And with their latest release, 0.8.5. I’m sure the figure is going to be even higher, given that Democracy Player is now a universal binary and blazingly fast. So, here’s what’s so special about the new version:

  • One-click subscription: This is huge for publishers– let your viewers subscribe to your channel from your website with a single-click.
  • External torrent support: Democracy Player can now serve as a standard BitTorrent client for .torrent files that you download from the web.
  • Fullscreen controls on windows: Windows now has fullscreen controls so that you can skip forward and back, fast forward, rewind, pause, etc.
  • Interface polish: We’ve made a few nice improvements to the interface, including: an indicator that shows when channels are updating and a nicer download progress bar.
  • Bug fixes, speed improvements, and tweaks: We say this every time and it’s true every time– this is our most stable release yet.

Democracy started life as a Mac only application, and now they’ve branched out to Windows and Linux (which was always the intention). However, with the release of 0.8.5 as a Universal Binary I think we can now truly christen Democracy as a ‘true’ Mac application, and hopefully watch it take over the Mac IPTV world in the coming months.. Mwahahaha..

You can download Democracy Player for Mac, Windows and Linux at www.getdemocracy.com


  • http://... Nic

    Now if we could only get Chinese Democracy

  • Emory

    Huh, this is pretty funny. I was actually trying this out yesterday, but I was having trouble with it. IMO the easiest way to automatically download rss bittorrent feeds was to download TED and just use your regular torrent downloader (azureus in my case) Been working fine, I now have about 10 episodes of Law and Order waiting for me to watch :D. How has everyone else found democracy?

  • http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/08/7458/ UNEASYsilence » Review: Democracy Player 0.9 updates

    [...] Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, invited me to take a sneak peak of the upcoming update(s) for the open-source Democracy Player. For an introduction of the OS X (Universal Binary), Linux, & Windows friendly Democracy Player, check out our write-up approximately one month ago. [...]

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