The New Video

Good friends stayed over this past weekend. The main topics of conversation were blogs, google, science and anxieties over our future careers.

There I found out about Google Video Search. At some point people thought that the internet would replace television, and then more recently this idea has been ridiculed - but something tells me that the death of TV (or at least a great paradigm shift) may actually occur.

Read this interesting article from the Boston Phoenix about the Participatory Culture Foundation.

But as corporations lick their chops at the prospect of digital-video windfalls, Worcester's Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), a small cadre of young activists and programmers, is heading in the opposite direction. The group has developed an open-source, nonprofit Internet TV platform that looks to draw the average viewer into this brave new world. Called DTV in its current Mac-only beta version (but due to be renamed when it launches for both Mac and Windows in the next few weeks), it's an intuitive, user-friendly way to find free online video, subscribe to daily video feeds, organize your video library, and, importantly, publish your own video content. It's a significant development in online television, and the first major step in the PCF's grand mission to "create an independent, creative, engaging, and meritocratic TV system for millions of people around the world."