» The Democracy Player Relaunches as Miro…Joost Alternative? :: 93South

The Massachusetts online video bubble continued to grow today with the relaunch of Miro (formerly The Democracy Player). The Miro service is an open-source desktop software that combines video search, channel guide and media player into one slick desktop application. It also has a BitTorrent and podcast client as well. The free video aggregation service is a product of The Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA) who also operates the video social bookmarking site, VideoBomb.

In a user interface heavily borrowed from iTunes, the Miro software allows you to create video channels from the MRSS feeds primarily provided by over 1,500 very, very long tail content publishers (think of the 1,000 vloggers out there trying to rip-off the Rocketboom, lonleygirl15, “latest video hit” concept). To watch video, you first select to download the video from it’s source to watch locally. Miro comes with only a few pre-loaded channels but users can easily grab additional video channels from the Miroguide. It also has the ability to search and download video from a list of viral video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and Revver.

I am a huge fan of the wave of new desktop video services including VeohTV and Joost for their potential to deliver video content in a way that my current soviet-era Comcast cable box is just not capable. However, my one real issue with Miro is that is suffers from a shortage of top quality professional content. There is a massive amount of video content and I did download and watch today but I am not sure that I would be an avid user just yet.

This also happened when I first played around with the earlier version of service last year, I spent a few days downloading everything I could but quickly lost interest after the novelty wore off. I like the concept and but not the content. Let’s face it, (not unlike my blog here) there’s a lot of crap being produced out there and my problem is not having access to any more of it…it’s having a way to filter it for the video I would actually like to watch.

That being said – It is 100% worth a spin for online video fans and I will install Miro on the laptop that I am connecting to my TVs…is someone going to create a good TV Guide for the video aggregators?

Check out the Miro BUZZ! Here is the other part of the story – just how much blog buzz is going on today for the launch. Check out this sample of the blogs posts covering the announcement.