Miro

» see getmiro.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Miro was an open-source project with a mission statement, and that is usually a sign you are looking at software more people rooted for than ran. I knew it the way an engineer knows a certain kind of well-meaning tool, from release notes and Linux package lists rather than from actually living inside it. It was built by a nonprofit, the Participatory Culture Foundation, and it wanted something genuinely large: an open alternative to television, owned by nobody.

it started in 2006 under the name Democracy Player, which tells you the flavor of the people behind it. The name confused users into thinking it was political software, so in 2007 they renamed it Miro and widened the pitch. The idea stayed the same. You subscribed to video feeds the way you subscribed to podcasts, and Miro pulled them down, played them, and kept a library, mixing video podcasts with YouTube and bittorrent into one guide of channels.

for a few years around 2008 this looked like a real answer to the question of what internet video would become. It ran free on every desktop operating system, and it belonged to no company that would sell you out later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the appeal was that Miro treated the whole open web as a source. It could grab a bittorrent video feed or a plain YouTube channel and present them together as things you followed. In an era before every site had its own app and its own walled player, an aggregator that spoke every format at once felt like the sane way to watch.

~ the cracks ~

the problem was that video did not stay open. It went into the browser and then into apps, each service walling off its own catalog behind its own player and its own login. An aggregator only works while the things it aggregates want to be aggregated, and one by one they stopped wanting that. YouTube in particular kept changing the interface a program like Miro relied on to fetch video.

~ the long tail ~

the Participatory Culture Foundation stopped developing Miro, and the last version, 6.0 in 2013, quietly broke when a YouTube api change pulled the floor out from under it. Nobody was left to patch it. The code is still out there, free as it always was, running against a web that no longer answers the way it used to.

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