Worcester's Democracy is changing its name and the way we watch

By Chet Williamson

A Worcester-based non-profit that makes the open-source Internet TV platform called Democracy has received a $100,000 grant from Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, often recognized as the poster child for the open-source movement. The Democracy Player, which has been described as "TiVo for the Internet," is a free and open way to watch, share and broadcast video on the Internet.

In an online statement issued last week, Nicholas Reville, executive director and co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), the company that created the software, said, "Mozilla shares our mission, almost to the letter — they are a non-profit, building open tools that defend and expand the fundamentally democratic nature of the Internet. What they are doing for the Web, we want to do for video."

Asked to describe what Democracy is, Reville says, "We make video software that you can download. It is designed in a way that keeps things open for publishers and users. It's designed to take advantage of the openness of the Internet."

Here's how it get it: Go to Democracy.com. Download the software the same way you would download Skype, Firefox or I-Tunes. Run it and you can see all the different channels or videos that you can subscribe to. The software automatically checks the channels every day. If there are new videos it will download them. The software and content is free.

"Our goal isn't to make money off of you," Reville says. "Our goal is to give you the best possible video experience. Let me tell you the reason why we are doing this. TV is the most important medium in our culture and it is moving online. I think everybody can see that. As that happens, it's important that it moves online in a very open way and not be controlled by a handful of corporations.

"If you look at some of the competition, either YouTube, Microsoft, Comcast or whoever, all those companies are trying to control users and have all the content come through them. Our focus is on putting a direct connection between the publishers and the view. Our software facilitates that."

Ironically, Mozilla has been able to generate revenue from their relationship with Google, which Reville points out "brings in money when people use Google search with Firefox."

Worcester community television station WCCA-TV's Michael Benedetti says the "cool thing" about the Democracy Player is that it "makes it easy for somebody to keep up to date with the shows that we are putting on the Web. People can click a button and Democracy will fire up and it will say, "Here are the WCCA shows and I'll show you the shows in the future."

Benedetti says PCF has indirectly helped to promote WCCA. "The other cool thing is: The channels that you subscribe to don't have to be some official channel," he says. "For example, you can subscribe to a search. I put up a show last week and it hasn't even gone to TV and we've had almost 600 viewers online. For public access that's pretty good."

The Mozilla gift is a matching grant doubled by two $50,000 gifts. One is from Skyline Public Works, a West Coast company. The other is by a Texas donor named David Glassco. In explaining the reason for issuing the grant, Mozilla CEO John Lilly says, "Their mission is very close to what our mission is and that is to keep the Internet open — so it doesn't belong to the Microsofts and Googles or a few commercial interests."

The grants arrive just as Democracy Player is about to announce a name change to Miro. "In Spanish it means, ‘I see, I look,'" Reville says.

The final version of Democracy Player went up last week. Reville says that over the next couple of months PCF will be emerging on to the scene at a much larger scale. "So we are hoping to build users, momentum and really push forward. Our focus is on longer format, higher quality, more of a TV-watching experience. o