Do you watch video on your computer?

Do you appreciate public access programming?

There's now a "Public Access TV" version of the popular video player Miro, which comes pre-loaded with several free channels of public access programming.

Click to download:

• Windows .exe (25MB)
• Mac .dmg (20MB)

If you are already a Miro user, you can click the button below to subscribe to all the public access channels:

(The list of channels is here.)

You can download this to Miro or another video player, and see all the cable access shows on the net, as they are posted.

Included stations:

• Worcester Community Cable Access
• Belmont Media Center (Google Video feed)
• Cambridge Community TV
• Davis Media Access
• Framingham
• Community Television of Santa Cruz County (also their Blip page)
• Manhattan Neighborhood Network
• Takoma Park City TV
• Willits Community Television (page at Brightcove)

If you are already a Miro user, you can click the button below to subscribe to all the public access channels:

List of all Public Access Organizations

Looks like there's some trouble with items uploaded to the Internet Archive between 10 and 30 days ago.

Here's the error:
"The item you have requested has a problem with one or more of the metadata files that describe it, which prevents us from displaying this page."

At least the items still exist; if they didn't the error would be "Exhausted all choices for locator URLs. Item cannot be found."

The Archive, for all their good points, are notoriously silent about these sorts of problems. A quick note that "Nobody's files are lost, and they'll reappear soon" would go a long way to making Archive users less anxious.

As it is, I'm wondering if I should hustle and look for copies of the currently-missing files on my computers, and ask friends if they've downloaded copies.

We've made a big change in the way our on-line calendar works; if all goes well, you won't notice a thing.

Please send any error reports to mike@wccatv.org.

There's a slightly different URL to add events: click here.

WCCA uses the Internet Archive to store both broadcast-quality and internet-quality copies of our shows.

Archive honcho Brewster Kahle:

The Internet Archive's outgoing bandwidth doubled today to both the commercial Internet and Internet2.

[...]

But we are not out of the woods yet. Our next step is to find other bottlenecks in our system to help get more cultural materials to more people faster.

Great news for everyone who takes advantage of WCCA's on-demand video downloads.

We're pleased to be running on the latest, greatest version of Drupal.

If you notice anything amiss, please e-mail mike@wccatv.org.

Happy surfing!

Terry Heaton got a sweet new net/TV/phone connection and writes:

I have never been more convinced that the business model of television is at serious risk and that broadcasters who continue to believe that their real competition is the guy across town (see Steve's excellent piece below) are on a one-way path to the tar pits. It is not a time for same-old, same-old, and reaching for revenue in a multi-platform delivery paradigm alone is not going to produce enough revenue growth to offset losses to our incumbent businesses.

Doc Searls has some great thoughts on this whole issue.

If you occasionally sit around worrying about video codecs, this BBC podcast about their Digital Media Initiative is worth listening to. WCCA is basically "the BBC of Worcester," and all this stuff is currently relevant to us, or will be very soon. (Via Boing Boing.)

Our stream seems to be stable for the first time in weeks.

Here's how we built it.

The information here is a result of a long learning and expensive process. It did not come free. So we hope viewers would consider making a donation to WCCA TV to help continue research and experimenting with the goal to enhance community participation in this process.

Please consider sending a check payable to:
WCCA TV, 415 Main St. Worcester, Ma 01608 att Executive Director

Thank you
Mauro

Here at WCCA, we use the non-profit Internet Archive to store DVD-quality versions of our videos online.

This is an amazing site, full of old movies, Grateful Dead concert recordings, and many weird and unexpected things.

For more about the background of the Archive, you can listen to this interview with founder Brewster Kahle (recorded in 2006).

Archive President Rick Prelinger published an interesting manifesto last month: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material.

See the stream page for more info.

I'm watching the stream right now using VLC on Windows. No luck with Media Player for some reason.