Media center/libraries are a joke. They require files to view, yet the present state of the web is pushing towards renting a stream. Across the landscape, your media distribution channels are too varied to allow for any progress on the part of the people/users.  File-ownership is where it started.. but ownership somehow didn’t equal distrution rights. When “rights” aren’t in line with behavior, it’s legally called “infringment”. When you flip it upside down, and the law is too heavy-handed for behavior, it’s call totalitarianism.  While I won’t get sucked into that never-ending debate, how can a user ever access all his media outlets in a sane manner?

Let’s skip ahead for a minute to the future. When I see something on a blog or otherwise, and I wish to *share* it with someone, I’d like to be able to do that. No one doubts this is a crime. If the person is in the living room with me, I’d like to be able to swipe,circle,copy-paste,drag-n-drop,etc. the item of interest onto my TV or projector, instead of handing over my laptop. After all, that’s what a larger-than-13″-screen is for. How can this be accomplished today when the object of interest is a file? (be it a pdf, image, song or video) This is the easiest: you copy the file to the server, and have the server config’d to display what is newest in a folder.

But what are we to do when the object of interest is a stream, and the stream is not “open”, but bound-in by flash? Examples: youtube, hulu, last.fm, pandora. These things I cannot drag-and-drop. They may have a URL, but the data is not separate from the view: navigating with a mouse through a website/flash start-stop-pause control is still required. I can’t exactly do that with a remote, unless I go hi-tech with a wii-mote; even then navigating the web is clunky.

All I’m asking for is a pure data-feed-URL. One which is Universal.. for all things trying to Locate a Resource, y’know? Until then, it’s either a boycott of Flash, or giving up on the dream of simple resource-sharing. Flash killed the internet. But who’s going to boycott hulu, except Apple & Comcast (who’s trying to buy Hulu’s #1 content provider, NBC!). Wow– now there’s a mess for ya.