Become a Democracy Subscriber « Miro

Miro Internet TV Blog

Become a Democracy Subscriber

March 28th, 2007 by Nicholas Reville

Today we’re launching a very important new project, and we really need your help.

Here’s the details: Become a Democracy Subscriber

Update: We just got our 100th subscriber– we’re off to a pretty good start. But we still need your help!

Comments to “Become a Democracy Subscriber”

Charbax says:

March 28, 2007 at 1:57 pm

This is great, a few little suggestions:

- Foreigners shouldn’t have to choose the state “Other” for the form to submit correctly in Credit Card mode, and if they hadn’t chosen a State from the list it would tell the user to restart filling the form from the start.

- Provide users overview of their subscription when they log-in on getmiro.com or getmiro.com or simply at http://www.getmiro.com/subscribe/ , let the subscribers log-in to change the subscription amount they want to pay or to unsubscribe.

- Let users subscribe with any amount of money they want, it could be less than 10$ per month, it could be more than that. And say for example that only people paying at least 10$ per month get the T-shirt. A minimum of for example 500$ donated could maybe display the company URL under the About page for one next official release.

I guess you could do just as well with 6000 subscribers paying 1$ per month than 600 subscribers paying 10$ per month.. And if there is no minimum you could then maybe have more than 10 thousand subscribers this way..

Just some suggestions.. Looking forward to Miro, I hope it minimizes to tray with bandwidth throttling on right-click and much more awesome stuff.

Matt Cox says:

March 29, 2007 at 1:05 am

Hmm, I liked it when Last.fm went into subscribe mode and gave you extra features in order to make a bit of cash – except I had an income then so could afford to be one of the lucky ones.

If I had the money right now, I’d subscribe – it all sounds fair enough to me. Five dollars is only two pounds fifty here in the UK – which is nothing – lovely exchange rates.

Charbox’s suggestion of ‘letting users subscribe what they want to’ I’m unsure of; five dollars isn’t that unreasonable. I’m trying to relate it back to what last.fm did with their subscription service when they first launched – because it did seem rather successful.

What would be interesting to see if rather than have to worry about that money coming out every month, the option to pay the five dollars a month OR grab myself a yearly subscription.

Obviously to encourage people to get a yearly subscription you could maybe lower the price to $54 and let people know that they’d save 10% on a yearly sub!! $49.99 – over two months free! Or maybe offer two t-shirts instead of the one to yearly subscribers.

The advantage of this is that you’re getting that money now, and you could be using it immediately, rather than having to wait a while for the montly payments to come through.

As I said, I’ve no money now to do either, but I do prefer paying for the year than monthly with some things – and I don’t think democracy would be an exception.

Robbie says:

March 29, 2007 at 10:52 am

I would happily subscribe if the subscribed version had more features, access to to premium content or guaranteed better level of access (as last.fm does).

As it stands, I’m not sure a T-shirt and a newsletter are going to be sufficient incentives for people to contribute $60 per year to the project…

Robbie

Matt Hartley says:

March 29, 2007 at 2:21 pm

http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/it/2007/03/28/im-a-subscriber-are-you

Nicholas Reville says:

March 29, 2007 at 2:50 pm

Thanks Matt!!

atsushi says:

March 31, 2007 at 1:39 pm

good morning from japan.

http://dtvjp.biz/40/

| PCF announces a new Channel Guide as a trial base
| and a new project for support. This is an abstract
| for Japanese users.

http://dtvjp.biz/30/

A Japanese translation of your announcement:
“Custom Versions of Democracy Player Now Available.”

# It’s not an April Fool’s joke

thanks.

Chadd says:

April 1, 2007 at 9:33 am

I think raising money through donations is a wonderful idea as many people would be willing to help subsidize the project they use. However, with the talk of subscription models and such there needs to be care taken not to steer people in the wrong direction. Much like the Democracy name is changing because it gave people the wrong impression of what the project was about, there also needs to be similar care toward being careful with the word subscription (it’s a loaded word when it comes to computer apps). The option to donate should be free and open with great care toward handling how it is framed.

Incentives for donators is an excellent idea to showcase those who go the extra mile to help and I am particularly fond of listing participating individuals and companies on some sort of webpage or announcement. It helps give validation and credit to those who help out.

I, however, do not think subscribers having access to advanced features or premium content (as mentioned above) is the right thing for Democracy (Miro) as it goes against the openness and freedom in media that this project promotes. That would take it in a business direction that doesn’t seem to adhere to what seem to be the projects goals.

Nicholas Reville says:

April 1, 2007 at 11:06 am

Chadd– I completely agree with you on this. Above all, it is crucial that Democracy Player (Miro) be completely free and open to anyone. We need to find ways to pay our bills, but we will never ask people to pay to get special features. If you (or anyone reading this) think that any of donation requests seem to imply that becoming a subscriber is necessary to use the software, please drop me a line. We really don’t want to convey that in any way.

Chadd says:

April 2, 2007 at 4:31 am

I understand what the subscriber model is for and absolutely understand the need to cover costs. I was just offering a word of caution about how this can be perceived if its not implemented with the right understanding.

On a side note, I hope this works out well and keeps the project going. If I had the money to donate I would, but as time is what I do have I will continue to help with the channel guide.

Good luck Democracy (Miro)!

marc says:

April 17, 2007 at 6:41 am

I do not understand the need for once more a new player when there already are so many for free (WMP, QT, ….) and when Adobe just announce soon to release a Flash video base player for free (sounds real demacratic as a price). With the ubiquity of Flash I don’t understand why not to make use of such a widespread technology (like YouTube did for instance). Even WMP sounds better than you Democratic player with, lets be honest, almost no audience for the content one wanna share ….