Dovetail, it's like YouTube: The Director's Cut

I love the idea of YouTube. The democratization of content creation, everyone having a shot at their own 15 minutes, the very real and ephemeral feeling that a dynamic community nurtures. What I don't like are 15 year old kids whining about their lives on webcams or replying to someone else's creative work with derogatory juvenile comments. Call me a curmudgeon but, my idea of entertainment isn't colored by an attention span which shares its depth and breadth with that of a teetsy fly. There are some excellent things on YouTube, but they're buried in a pile of useless drivel.

Dovetail is like rethinking YouTube with an eye on quality of video and of content. There are no webcam replies, no commentary flame wars, just good film produced by independents with an eye for visually aided storytelling. It's the kind of service that, fed with enough constantly new content, could make you think seriously about giving up your TV. Dovetail does require you to install a simple application that lets you to tag videos to download and watch in full quality after viewing short flash quality webclips. It's well worth the install, based on the open source Azureus Bittorrent client and is relatively simple to use.

End to end Dovetail works very well, with its only drawback being a limited quantity of content. There are a few hundred short to full length titles in the Dovetail library at current, but with the number of sharp young filmmakers, and a pleathora of comparatively inexpensive equipment available these days I could certainly forsee a time when Dovetail, or a service quite like it, retires the current concept of a TV channel to the dustbin of history.

Tags: azureus, bittorrent, Dovetail, internet tv, InternetTv, iptv, tv replacement, TvReplacement