This is a draft. A small video player, built as a counter-model.
Most embedded players are surveillance instruments wearing a play button. They set cookies, load third-party scripts, log who watched what and for how long, and feed it back into a recommendation machine you don't control. Until recently this one quietly did some of that too: it pulled its typeface from Google's servers, so every viewer's browser phoned home before the video even started. We noticed. We fixed it.
Now it doesn't. The media sits on our own storage. There are no third-party scripts, no cookies, no tracking pixels, no algorithm deciding what you see next. If Civic Interplay disappeared tomorrow, the file would still play and you could still download it.
It is a tiny thing. But sovereignty over infrastructure starts with small refusals: the choice to host your own file, to not phone home, to let a viewer just watch.
The promises
- No third-party scripts, no cookies. The player calls no domain but our own. Nothing to consent to.
- Self-hosted media. The video files live on our storage, not a platform's.
- Captioned and legible by default. Accessibility is the baseline, not an add-on.
- Portable. Native, downloadable, and it keeps working if we don't.
Put it on your own site
Paste this wherever you can drop HTML. It loads nothing from us until someone presses play.
<iframe
src="https://civicinterplay.io/embed/olah-vatican-2026"
style="width:100%; border:0; aspect-ratio:16/9"
loading="lazy"
allowfullscreen
title="Civic Interplay video player"
></iframe>