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Miro vs. Joost: The Doctorow Doctrine

Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing’s slayer of DRM, writes this morning about open source Joost-killer “Miro.”

Miro has done extensive outreach to indie creators, has no privacy-invading tracking of your viewing habits, delivers HD video, and is built on free software and open standards. [from BB]

Download the free software, pick the channels you want (over 2,500 of them at present, and anyone can publish new channels), and Miro will subscribe to your favorite net-shows, checking their RSS feeds for new episodes and downloading them with BitTorrent… It doesn’t matter what video format the shows are in, because Miro includes VLC, the open video player that can play pretty much every file-format on the net. [from BB]

Cory then points us to the Miro vs. Joost page on the GetMiro site, which summarizes Miro’s benefits vis-a-vis Joost, and wraps it all up with “Do you want corporations to decide what you watch?”

A few thoughts:

Yes. Most people do want corporations to decide what they watch. That’s what the vast, vast majority of people have accepted already with cable TV, satellite TV, BlockBuster or NetFlix for rentals, and so on. If you really think about why that is, it makes sense: media corporation’s programming decisions reflect aggregated demand trends - i.e.: to produce popular programming, they produce shows that people will want to watch - i.e.: they’re acting as a content filter based on their gestalt understanding of popular culture.

That understanding is never perfect, and to be sure media co.’s are guilty of trying to manipulate popular culture and dumb it down (boy bands, “reality” tv, and everything else banal). But - independent programming isn’t inherently any better - take a look around YouTube and see how culturally significant or politically insightful the average user-created, crowd-sourced, indie-produced net clip is.

So - regardless of my own political affiliations, do I consider freedom from corporate rule to be a source of competitive advantage for Miro? No. Consumers want to consume. Not filter, sift, evaluate, subscribe, and then consume.

Corporations remove all of the barriers between consumers and consumption, and consumers have stated - more or less unanimously - that they’re willing to pay the financial and cultural (reduced selection) price for that value proposition. Joost recognizes this, and capitalizes on it.

Ultimately, Miro is positioning itself as a long-tail content portal - an entirely valid niche product category, where it will no doubt enjoy success in a number of market segments. Positioning itself vis-a-vis Joost, is IMHO folly, however - its a different value proposition that appeals to different usage scenarios and different markets.

Hopefully Miro does better than the last, almost identical entrant in this market: crowd favourite FireAnt (see initial review comparing FireAnt to Joost, later problems, and “acquisition“).

boing boing, cory doctorow, doctorow, fireant, joost miro

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Congrats to FireAnt on acquisition

Ahhh, FireAnt - the little company that couldn’t just got bought by another company that couldn’t (ODEO, bought by Sonic Mountain) for $400k.

I first posted about FireAnt in April, where I pointed out that their branding was confusing, their traffic was petering out, and that not having either the old or the new player available for download was bizarre.

I revisited FireAnt a week later (expecting some updates), to receive website errors, and a sputtering, angry response from founder Josh Kinberg.

Since that time, 6 months have passed - and nothing has changed on FireAnt. No new software (still in beta, I suppose). Not even the featured channels on the front page have changed.

So - congrats to FireAnt for getting bought; it seems like the best option as the company no longer seemed to be able to execute on their own - its too bad, I was really pumped about FireAnt when I first stumbled across it. The 400k acquisition price I’m sure adequately reflects the value FireAnt brings to the table after a year of stagnation.

fireant, odeo, podcasts vlogs

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FireAnt.tv - Confusion

I had hoped to post a full review of FireAnt - the social / vlog player and community, but I’ve been stymied by a buggy and confusing website.

As I understand it, FireAnt consists of a downloaded desktop client, and a social hub website. I couldn’t test the client as I couldn’t find it to download, and problems with the website began in registration, where it ran into PHP missing parameter errors. The prominent appeals to try “FireAnt Beta v2″ dead-end with a send-your-email-address-into-the-void form, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to download “v1″ client or anything else.

In the end, what I was left with was a website of videos organized by content channels, played within the site with QuickTime, and including post-roll advertisements. You can rate and tag videos, and add them to your “playlist” - a feature which doesn’t seem to do anything without the desktop application. Tagging and well-thought out content categories make it easy to find good video, and the notion of the website and desktop client staying in sync (i.e.: building your playlist) is appealing if un-testable at the moment.

The social opportunities on the site itself have been missed, or at least unrealized - on the website there are no comments, no “who else liked this video,” no “other people who liked this also enjoyed,” or any functionality beyond a basic web-media player. Clicking the “People” tab takes you to a search form only; the one trial search I did yeilded a person who’s playlist consisted of pr0n - something to do with a “mexicum threesome,” which I decided not to watch. Perhaps the desktop client more fully realizes the social potential here, or perhaps the website is awaiting a future release to do so.

So - I was pretty disappointed. When I originally stumbled across FireAnt, I’d hoped to have discovered a JOOST in sheep’s clothing - especially after reading TechCrunch’s coverage (FireAnt Just Rocks). With the site offering user-created content channels and touting the fact that…

FireAnt has 19,835 channels and 1,110,256 episodes, and adding more each day!

…it seems like the issues at hand are (a) getting the desktop client back on the site, and (b) buidling out the social infrastructure on the site itself.

I hope their upcoming Beta release has some great features.

blogging, fireant, joost, mexicum, social, threesome vlogs

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Before JOOST, there was FireAnt

This is going to be a relatively quick post as I’m at work, up to my eyeballs. That being said, I was skimming Wired this morning and came across an article about Josh Kinberg - a protester who at the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC created a “dot matrix sidewalk printer bike” - as he rode it around, it printed messages (in water soluble chalk) that people texted to the bike. Of course, he was arrested (read the Wired story), the NYPD are a bunch of freedom-hating goons, and so on.

But - that’s not where Kinberg’s story ends. As the article mentions, he’s now on the opposite coast, involved (as in “founder and ceo”) in a “social media” project called FireAnt.

FireAnt is a desktop media player and RSS aggregator for Windows and Mac. With an integrated guide to Internet TV, the FireAnt player lets users subscribe to, download, and watch videos in multiple media formats, and synchronize video with portable devices, including iPod, PSP, Zen, Archos, Zune, and mobile phones. [from FireAnt > About]

That sounds a lot like JOOST to me, albeit without the major network relationships & content. And, FireAnt, in its current incarnation, has been available since January of ‘06, when it got a glowing review from TC.

Unfortunately, FireAnt appears to be stagnating. Take a look at Alexa and Compete - JOOST hasn’t even launched, and its flattened FireAnt’s very modest growth.

Perhaps its their confusing brand strategy. The site is at “getfireant.com,” though the page title refers to “fireant.tv.” “antisnottv.com” is also floating around out there - it took me a while to parse that out as “ant - is - not - tv.” Perhaps that confrontational relationship with the mainstream consumer’s desired experience (i.e.: watching TV) is why JOOST is buzz-worthy and FireAnt is flat. People like TV. They’re used to it, they know what to expect - its comfortable. JOOST is iterating TV - keeping it comfy and recognizeable, but also recognizably better enough to drive adoption. It appears FireAnt hasn’t found this balance yet.

All of that being said: I’m not going to be able to download and try out the FireAnt application until tonite. Has anyone out there tried it? Share your thoughts in the comments.

fireant, joost, media, podcasting, video vlogging

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