I'm a little emabarrased to say I heard about the following from a Wired story. I downloaded the free program, Democracy and I'm really impressed. I've only run it on my Mac but it's available on Windows and Linux as well, I'm not sure if all the features are on all platforms, I'm writing only about my experiences on the Mac.
Democracy is a video blogging client. To be more specific it's a BitTorrent client which (in the background) downloads videos published via RSS feeds and lets you play them. it automatically expires and deletes old videos like a Tivo does so that they don't take up too much room on your hard drive. To find good feeds Democracy gives you access to a well designed channel guide with categories and tagging capabilities. You can rate a video as "da bomb" (that's good) so that others can find highly rated content. The player has a full screen mode with translucent popup controls which remind me of features added to the last update to iPhoto. Democracy is a still in beta and I've run into a few glitches, but I'm really impressed to see an application which combines so many enabling technologies in such an easy to use way. No .torrent files to deal with, no remembering to delete large files, autodownloading of new content, easy ways to find new things of interest and to subscribe to future releases from providers you like. I haven't seen anything this complete since Tivo. And it's all free open source software.
So the real question is, is there good content? Well not all that much. First I should say that unlike most p2p file sharing sites, this content is free and legal, not pirated. You can enter any feed you find, but the channel guide is helpful in the same way the iTunes music store is helpful in finding music files and podcasts, just not as complete yet. You probably realize that TV will be very different 10 years from now. Democracy might be what it will look like.
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