Bill Wishon’s News and Views

I just downloaded Miro 1.0 last night and played around with it, and I think they got online video right.  While major corporations pay lipservice to giving the consumer what they want I think that Miro (actually built by the consumers) does a better job of giving me what I want.  Here’s why I like it:

• The user interface is clean and easy to understand.
• It supports subscriptions.
• It handles the playback of a variety of internet video formats for me.
• I can download content from a wide variety of internet video sites, including YouTube.
• It handles standard and high definition videos equally well.
• The installation process is easy and the default setup is user friendly (ie, no resource hogging services are installed and you get to choose whether or not you want Miro to run at startup.)

As I said before there are lots of major corporations and small startups building and deploying solutions in this space, the BBC with their iPlayer (good but only available in the UK), ABC with their online streaming service (pretty good experience & quality for a streaming service), NBC with the new NBC Direct Beta (don’t bother until it comes out of beta), Joost, Veoh and others.  To all of those companies I say download Miro and give it a try if you want to know what I want as a consumer.