Democracy Now!
Today I was searching around looking for some cool old time movies of San Francisco and having not a lot of luck. Places like YouTube don’t really cater to that kind of thing so I had to explore alternate avenues. In comes a fairly new program called “Democracy” which is an open source video player for internet tv. It’s kind of like an iTunes for freely published video content. I fired it up and in my first page of results on a search for San Francisco I was presented with historical quake destruction footage and some really neat newsreel stuff from the 30’s. It’s definitely a work in progress since you only get one page of search results and you only have results from Yahoo and Blogdigger at this point but even with the limitations there are some local channels you can subscribe to in the channel guide. Their website has this to say about what they’re trying to build:
There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice.
Check it out at getdemocracy.com or you can go straight to the download page. They have players for all the popular systems.
Related posts:
Try the Library of Congress. There’s a LOT of footage there. It’s probably the source of the above, but it’s not “flashy new pretty thing.”
Arhive.org also has some cool SF movies. I downloaded the large versions and used them when I vj’d at Ruby.
Archive.org also has some cool SF movies. I downloaded the large versions and used them when I vj’d at Ruby.