Daniell Krawczyk from Digital Bicycle is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. Here’s what Digital Bicycle says about itself on its home page:

DigitalBicycle is a project dedicated to making it easier for Community Media and Technology Centers, as well as independent media producers, to distribute media content amongst themselves. Using Bit Torrent, RSS, XML-RPC and web community software, we hope to simplify collaboration and cable access syndication.

Why the name? From the FAQ:

If a local producer wants to have their production shown in other communities they have to do two things. One, find a local sponsor. Two, arrange for copies of the show to be delivered to that sponsor or directly to the station for playback. The process of delivering tapes (either by hand or by mail) is known as “bicycling” in the cable access world.

Community media, Daniell explains, arose from telecom law that enables cities to negotiate franchises from the cable companies. The city takes a percentage of the fund to create an access point for members of the community. There have been national and regional alliances from just about the beginning. But because they were dealing with physical media, their efforts couldn’t scale. Now that it’s all digital…

“We’re trying to build connections and we’re trying to build community,” he says. They’re trying to build connections across distance and also trying to increase the connection between individuals and their communities. They’re trying to build a platform to make it easy for individuals to share their own media and easy for community media to use it. It’s built on open technologies: BitTorrent, Drupal, RSS, an open source version of mpeg4, Creative Commons licensing.

They are creating a site for PeerCasting communities: Once it comes out of stealth mode, you’ll be able to create a group for sharing content you’ve created. Prototypical user: A producer of content already showing up on local access channels who wants to share her content with other local channels. “We’re building this for an already-existing community.” It’s designed for content that’s “broadcast quality” in the sense that “viewers won’t think that it came off a computer.”

Tim Halle talks about the Project for Open source Media, describing a settop box they’re designing that will combine TV and Net streams.

Donna Liu talks about Princeton’s University Channel, a “collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world.” You can subscribe to particular content based on the available metadata. Same thing at Digital Bicycle.

Daniell says, in response to a question, that they intend to support enough standards that other services can aggregate content from the site. He hopes that local centers will aggregate and host as well. “We want to build the largest TV network but also a thousand community archives.”

In response to a question Daniell says they want to go global after they get it running domestically.

[Tags: DigitalBicycle media OpenSource berkman]