Holmes Wilson
Co-Director
hw[at]ppolitics.org
508-963-5645
General Inquiries
508-756-7496
May 24th, 2005 -- Announcing Broadcast Machine, new software that makes it easy to publish high-quality video over the internet with virtually no bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation on any website.
"With Broadcast Machine, anyone can broadcast their videos to their community - or millions of people - for free," says Tiffiniy Cheng, Co-Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation. "Using Broadcast Machine to publish video is similar to most blogging software."
Broadcast Machine is the publisher for the new internet video platform being developed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation. It is designed to dovetail with DTV, the open-source internet video player being released in June by the Participatory Culture Foundation. Together, Broadcast Machine and DTV will level the playing field for anyone with video to share by making it easy and affordable to publish full-screen video online.
"Video is the most popular mass medium, and now with Broadcast Machine, anyone can make a popular video and distribute it over the internet," says Cheng. "We think independent video can be a part of mainstream culture, and Broadcast Machine will help make that possible. Broadcast Machine is a simple, social tool that will help to build a new mainstream with independent voices."
Broadcast Machine, written in PHP, is cross-platform, open-source, and built on open standards. The software creates video "channels" for websites that produce a TV-like experience watching video on the internet. Broadcast Machine makes it easy to use bittorrent to publish full-screen video without incurring the high bandwidth costs associated with hosting video online.
Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It creates a browsable archive of videos on your website and offers the ability to view all your available videos on one page. Video publishing can be public or private, and requires no MySQL setup.
Nicholas Reville, Co-Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, says, "If someone told us in 1998 that web journals could compete with print media, we would have thought that was crazy. But now we've seen that easy, affordable tools can decentralize media and give everyone a voice. Simple, flexible platforms like Broadcast Machine can have huge social consequences."
For more information please contact Tiffiniy Cheng, Co-Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, tyc (at) ppolitics |dot| org, mobile: 508-963-1096, or visit www.participatoryculture.org/bm.