UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Much has been said about the unreasonable limitations built into Amazon’s Unbox video download service and other services like it. Democracy Player is something completely different. Instead of trying to shoehorn old business models into places where they just don’t make sense, Democracy Player embraces the possibilities of the internet and does something innovative.

Democracy Player allows you to discover new shows, subscribe to the shows you like, and automatically get the latest episodes. It even cleans out old stuff you don’t watch anymore like a Tivo. Instead of worrying about rss feeds, file formats, bittorrent clients, disk space, and all sorts of other stuff, it just works. The experience is similar to the first time I used the iTunes Music Store several years ago. It just makes sense that things should have always been this simple.

And that’s just the beginning. You can also do a lot of new and powerful things that, like many great ideas, seem so obvious in hindsight. For example, if you have a del.icio.us account (or another similar service) where you share your bookmarks, any videos you have bookmarked are already available as an rss feed. Drop that rss address into Democracy Player and all the video from around the web that you found interesting is available to you or your friends as a channel. It doesn’t matter if some of the video comes from YouTube and some comes from a video podcast distributed over BitTorrent. Again, it just works. Here are some other ideas to get you started.

Since Democracy Player is built on open standards, the possibilities are only limited by what the community can come up with. Democracy Player is completely free and works with Macs, Windows, and Linux. Give it a try.

technorati tags:democracy, player, drm, amazon, unbox, open, source, rss, podcasting