By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Open Media Network (OMN) launched this Tuesday an interesting public service project founded by Mike Homer, the man who co-founded Netscape with Marc Andreessen. Mr. Andreessen is also involved in this new venture, which is based on video-on-demand technology from Kontiki, where Mr. Homer is chairman.

“When we founded Netscape, we always had the goal of helping people easily publish on the Internet. That took a while; and now, with blogging and technologies such as RSS, we are finally there,” Mr. Homer said last week in a pre-briefing about the launch.

OMN allows anybody to upload video and share it. Kontiki uses a type of peer-to-peer distribution mechanism, while at the same time containing strong digital rights management technologies.

Will we see Flickriscious-like groups forming on OMN? Maybe, if it gets enough users. It'll be interssting to see how it is used.

From the press release...

Internet pioneers form OMN (www.omn.org) to let users easily access movies, music, video blogs, podcasts and public television and radio programming.

Open Media Network (OMN) was founded by Internet pioneer and Netscape veteran Mike Homer and includes Marc Andreessen as an advisor and board member.

The service offers users a broad selection of free public programs with a simple TV-style program guide and automatic background deliveries of favorite scheduled programming. Content producers can easily add their programming to the network, with unlimited free delivery of their shows and with digital rights protection.

Through the service, consumers can view the content on multiple devices, including PCs and iPods today and televisions and cell phones by this summer.

Open Media Network is powered by grid delivery technology from Kontiki, which already provides secure delivery of content libraries for a range of companies such as Ernst & Young, Verizon, AOL and the BBC. Kontiki’s grid delivery technology speeds the distribution of video and music files by allowing participants to share unused bandwidth on their computers and servers. There are already over 20 million users of Kontiki’s technology today.

The programs on OMN are authorized for public use by the producers and most are licensed under Creative Commons.

The Open Media Foundation is a private, non-profit foundation founded in 2005 by Internet and media pioneers who believe Internet users deserve a better, simpler and free way to get video and music programs that are authorized by their producers for Internet distribution. It is powered by grid delivery technology from Kontiki. More information can be found at www.omn.org.