The Participatory Culture Foundation has just released Miro, a free, open source RSS reader for video feeds. It can handle just about every video format that you can think of, has a built-in bittorrent client, and runs in both windowed and full screened modes. Formerly named the Democracy Player, this cross-platform player is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.

Miro displaying the channel guide

With a million video players and sites out there, why should you care about Miro? You should care about it because Miro is the first solid step toward independent TV. By creating an integrated player and channel guide, Miro is not trying to supplement your TV watching: It’s trying to replace it.

By including a built-in channel guide that containing nearly 1600 channels, Miro is taking all of the legwork out of finding quality, independent video on the web. With more channels being added every day (trust me, I volunteer moderating them. It never stops.), there is something available for every taste. I ripped the following category list out of the channel guide this morning so you can get an idea of the wide range of channels available:

• Activism 44 Channels
• Animals 14 Channels
• Animation 62 Channels
• Arts 217 Channels
• Business 44 Channels
• Comedy 227 Channels
• Education 120 Channels
• Environment 27 Channels
• Family 32 Channels
• Food 33 Channels
• Government 10 Channels
• Health 22 Channels
• International 117 Channels
• Kids 8 Channels
• Mac 16 Channels
• Movies & TV 194 Channels
• Music 177 Channels
• News 158 Channels
• Politics 102 Channels
• Religion & Spirituality 42 Channels
• Science 36 Channels
• Sports 77 Channels
• Technology 165 Channels
• Transportation 11 Channels
• Travel 65 Channels
• Video Blogs 196 Channels
• Video Games 19 Channels

Tons of content doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything worth watching though, right? While I will admit that there are a few high school video blogs in there (LOL! OMG! WTF! BRB!), they are generally outnumbered by the amount of quality content. If you like news, ABC, NBC, Reuters, BBC, Fox, G4TV, and plenty of independent channels are available. If you’re a sucker for comedies, there are tons of regularly produced, independent sitcoms like The Burg, We Need Girlfriends, and Cearealized.

I currently have over 50 channels loaded into my player that range from G4 TV Shows to independent web-only sitcoms, and there are more videos in those channels than I could watch in a week.

If the guide isn’t enough for you, you can blaze your own trail with the built in video search feature. It will let you hunt down videos on Blip.tv, YouTube, Videoh, DailyMotion, Google Video, Blogdigger, and Revver from a single interface. It will also allow you to save those searches as channels, so that you can get constant updates on your favorite topic, whether it’s “Robot Chicken” or “chicken monkey donkey porn”. You can even set up playlists of channels to have Miro play all of your videos back to back in full screen.

With all this downloading, it would be logical to expect that you have to keep a watchful eye on your hard drive to keep it from getting packed with the videos that you never watch, but Miro is designed to work within a limited space. When you add a channel from the guide, Miro will manage the download and storage of the videos to prevent your drive from filling up. After you watch each video, you have the option of saving it, deleting it, or letting it delete itself automatically after a set period of time.

Sound cool, yet? It should. It’s the future of independent content.

Miro Will Kill Your Television… if you let it.

The Participatory Culture Foundation is a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization which seeks to balance the playing field when it comes to producing and distributing content. They were recently funded by the Mozilla Foundation and seek to help solve the growing problem of a small number of corporations controlling mass media. You can help balance the scales by turning your eyeballs away from the TV and onto Miro. I have no affiliation with the PCF beyond being a volunteer channel moderator, so I’m not employed by them nor am I qualified to speak for them. If you want to blame someone for any errors or mentions of chicken monkey donkey porn, you’ll have to blame me in the comments or by email.

Posted in Geeky, Philosophical BS, Video