G.I.S.S. 3.0 : growing in a world of free media

G.I.S.S. ( Global Independent Streaming Support ) is an international network of free media activists, working in building an open infrastructure for free media collectives, intenting to cover all problematics of free independent media with GPL tools, from the storage of contents, its programming and its broadcasting.

More concretely, right now, the G.I.S.S. is an infrastructure with different components and tools for setting up an independent radio or video channel easily.

It has matured and offers now, in its version 3.0, made in 2008, several available components for setting up a free media server from scratch.

*a network of servers, mounted as relays to support big transmissions (the biggest events were the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, some transmissions
from Oaxaca and other free software and free culture events (Piksel, FISL,...)

* a map of the network activity available at : http://gollum.artefacte.org/mapuse/map.html that shows the real time activity of the channels

* a linux live cd called Sa'habuntu, including specific tools for audio and video streaming, some applications were developped by the G.I.S.S. Collective like the Theora Streaming Studio : TSS (http://gollum.artefacte.org/tss/), Pure Data externals and patches for complex streams and other useful applications (gstreamer, IDJC, ... )

* a distributed multi-media database system ( dmmdb) that enables any community to set up its own video archive channel and to share their contents with other similar archives comparable to a free distributed on-line video system.