DTV Beta: Internet TV On Your Mac

DTV is a new, free and open-source platform for internet television and video.

If you're the beta-testing type who likes to live a bit on the edge and in the online-video-saturated-future you want to be able to say, "that's not that cool... I started doing this stuff during the DTV Beta." Trust me, this is fairly big. All the parts have been there for a while, but the Participatory Culture Foundation has brought a lot of things together into a video player that makes it easier to find and play lots of the video content that is becoming available. The DTV player allows you to subscribe to different video "channels" and download new content as it becomes available.

We may even be using some of this stuff for distribution later in the year and I suspect that I may rant about this a bit more. Right now you need to be using a Mac and OS X version 10.3 and have QuickTime 7, but if you meet all those conditions, it's great and gives you a good idea of what's possible with video on the web. My favourite channels now are Rocketboom and Command-N (which you can watch outside of the DTV player as well as using the latest version of iTunes to subscribe to video content).