So I have to make a second post to turn the previous post into a preview, to hide out the gory bits for those who don't want to see it. I recently discovered this program called Democracy TV. Not sure what it has to do with democracy, but it's basically an infrastructure for taking videocasting blogs and making the experience as easy to use as your television. That is, you if you find blogs with videocasts that you like, you can turn these into "channels" on your DTV. The channels are downloaded via bittorrent (and thus extremely quickly), and DTV will download content in the background if you leave it running so that the next time you're at your computer, you have a whole bunch of fresh content to watch.

It's an interesting concept, and much more entertaining than "normal" TV. However, it looks like the channels (and the concept of video blogging itself) is still relatively young, as there's not all that much content. AdultSwim, Attack of the Show, and Comedy Central all have video podcasts which you can subscribe to, though they are short previews of contents played on their regular television media, rather than full episodes. There's some nice full content on channels like Frederator, FlashTV, It's Like Spiders, KnoxKast, Track-Shun and World Tales. KnoxKast is where I saw the "Klay Animation" cartoons that inspired the gory bits of the dream. Track-Shun is an anime show where the hosts shows 3 anima series and tells you whether you should track the series, or shun it (relatively well done, although the host seems too nervous and robotic when reading out his reviews). The rest are just random animations.

There's a built in searching using Yahoo!, so you can type in "Hentai" and find... disapointingly very little, actually. Democracy TV also seems to have trouble with unicode (i.e. non-English characters): When I searched for 「ハードゲイ」 ("Hard Gay") it crashed. I already submitted the bug report.

So in conclusion, right now, it's an interesting project with some good content already, but probably not enough content to replace normal TV if you want to be watching content 16 hours a day. Give it a year or two though, and I'm sure that'll change. I find that the content that it does have is already much better than the equivalent content on normal TV, and what's nice is that you can fastforward through clips (since they're all pre-downloaded), so you can, for example, skip all those Yaris commercials on the Attack of the Show clips.