Kindle
Miro is the new name for the awesome Internet TV player previously known as "Democracy Player." Now that Democracy has gone 1.0 (almost, see below), it's got a new name, new features, and an incredible future ahead of it. Miro is easy: just pick some channels -- video podcast feeds -- and Miro will download all the video from your channels. Miro downloads with Bittorrent, meaning that there's never a problem with popular sites going down because they're clobbered by too many requests. Miro can play any video, because it incorporates the free/open video player called VLC, which plays practically every video format under the sun.
Miro also grabs YouTube videos, and has access to more HD content than any other source online or off.
The future of Internet TV is too important to belong to one company. Internet TV needs to live atop something open and free, the way that the Web lives on top of the open and free Firefox browser. That's why Miro is licensed under the GPL, the gold standard in open/free licensing, meaning that anyone can take Miro and run with it, improve it, sell it, or give it away.
Miro is created by a charitable foundation called the Participatory Culture Foundation, an organization that also makes complimentary, free packages like Broadcast Machine (for publishing your own video channels) and VideoBomb (like Digg, but for video). The foundation pays programmers to improve the technology, and it's entirely free to use and improve.
Miro is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Link
(Disclosure: I am honored to serve on the Participatory Culture Foundation's Board of Directors)
Update: Nicholas Reville of PCF sez, "We're not quite at 1.0, this is called Public Preview 1 (0.9.8). We wanted to give ourselves a little room for refinement before we slap on the 1.0 label."
I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.