We’re not quite set to go public with our plans yet, but we’ll post them here as soon as we are.

And yes, monoculture is another word that aptly describes the result of such a dominant player in the space. Monopoly may not be the perfect term to describe the direction internet video is headed, but I will continue to use it as a way to convey my point. It’s a word that a lot of people know, and the definition on Wikipedia is right in line with what I’m arguing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

The network effect may be the mechanism that drives everyone to YouTube but the result is a monoculture.

I just picked up on the word “co-organizing”, who else is involved?

Yes Miro supports HD very well. blip.tv or Internet Archive (archive.org) are two (of many) ways to host HD video.

Sam,

Perhaps “network effect” would have been a more appropriate term for that particular point, but I would still argue that a YouTube monopoly is/would be bad. Why would we want one organization to have such an unprecedented influence on the media that we have access to (as far as the web is concerned)? Furthermore, I’m not complaining “just because,” but rather see this as raising an issue that isn’t well represented.

First off, Miro will never displace YouTube, and that has never been our intention (not to mention, Miro is a client and relies on services like YouTube). It would be more accurate to say that we’re working to guide YouTube in a more open direction.

At this point, they basically have very little incentive to be open and and a few financial reasons to be more closed. Of course Miro doesn’t have the market share (yet) to affect a giant like YouTube, but think back to when Mozilla was nothing but a grain of sand compared to Microsoft. Fast forward to today, and you have a radically different web, because of the open standards built into Firefox and their huge userbase.

Second, Miro doesn’t have much of a gate to keep. We’re an open source client application that works best in situations where video hosts are using web standards (RSS) for publishing. We do have the Miro Guide, but alternative guides can easily be added (a web page = a guide), and we’re preparing to open the source code for the guide too. Additionally, as we receive demand (and resources to implement this stuff), we’ll open up the Miro Guide in other ways too (openID, openSocial, etc). In the end, I think it’s difficult to compare a non-profit, whose mission is to make media more open, to a gigantic commercial web service that has financial incentives to protect their market share.

You say, “So instead of one gatekeeper to the audience perhaps what we need are free and open protocols for searching and subscribing to video content.” And this is exactly what we’re doing.

Thanks joining in the discussion!

Perhaps a better phrase would have been “network effect”, that is after all what you’re talking about. It’s very hard to avoid network effects, if Miro were to displace YouTube as the tool most people used to find video wouldn’t it then become the de-facto gatekeeper to the audience. Albeit perhaps a nicer one and more democratic, but by your terms wouldn’t it then be a new monopoly?

So instead of one gatekeeper to the audience perhaps what we need are free and open protocols for searching and subscribing to video content, so that we can have a multitude of ways to distribute, search for and watch video content (In similar way to how OpenID is going to transform the online identity echosystem).

I’d like to see PCF working with the microformats community on efforts such as this:
http://microformats.org/wiki/video-metadata-model
and once there is a standard for a Video Metadata Model I think it should be PCF leading a campaign to get every website on the net that has video content to start using it, similar to Mozilla’s “Don’t hurt the web” campaign: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Promote_MDC