"I think one of the most important things that we are hoping to do, and we hope that people will help us with, is just talking about the message of open video, talking to people about why it's so important that the way videos are distributed online be open, and where the future of media is headed. Do we want it to be something that has a lot of gatekeepers? Do we want more proprietary systems, more closed off systems? Or do we want to make something that's truly open, truly accessible?"
Nicholas Reville is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the creators of the Miro Internet TV Platform. Miro was a Featured Project at the NetSquared Conference in May 2007, and the Second Place Winner of the NetSquared Innovator Award.
You can hear an audio interview with Nicholas on the NetSquared Podcast, and a transcript of the interview is posted below.
You can also listen to Miro's 5-minute pitch at the Conference.
Nicholas Reville: My name is Nicholas Reville. I'm one of the founders and the Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, and we make Miro, which is a desktop application for watching Internet TV, and playing and organizing videos. We're set up as a nonprofit because we think that open video online is crucially important to the future of our media.
Television has been, historically, a very non-democratic medium, something that's been controlled by a small number of people. It's really a one-way broadcast. As that moves online, we have a chance to change that, and make it something that's open to anybody. There are a lot of companies right now that are trying to put video online in a very closed, proprietary way. We're trying to build something open, something that works like the Internet itself, specifically for video, and that's what Miro is all about.