Boxee Soon to Open Its Doors to All
Many sites have been abuzz for a little while now about a piece of software called Boxee. Maybe you’ve heard of it? If not that’s fine as this can serve as a brief introduction to a very nice piece of media center software. Forums were filling up with post after post of people wanting invites to try out Boxee. The reason for this was since due to the wanting to scale their server architecture. They kept things under control by using an invite system. Well that’s all about to change.
Come January 8, 2009 Boxee will open those floodgates and everyone will have open access to try out Boxee. Well by everyone they mean only Mac and Ubuntu user’s. Their closed alpha testing stage generated over 150,000 sign ups, obviously a much larger number than they were ever expecting. We have been active in testing Boxee since it was announced and things are coming along nicely…for something that’s still in its infancy.
So for those of you who are completely lost as to what Boxee is here you go: Boxee builds upon the widely popular XBMC (Xbox Media Center) by taking the normal media center functions and extending them to online video streaming. Along with that they have built a social network within the app in which friends can rate and recommend things to watch, amongst other abilities as well.
The most enticing feature of Boxee is it’s ability to stream content from sites like Hulu and Comedy Central, to name a couple. This is extremely nice as Hulu alone contains thousands of full TV shows and movies. All this can now be streamed right to your big screen TV which is nice and convenient, granted the quality is only so so. This can be done from any OSX 10.4 or 10.5 computer, AppleTV, or Ubuntu system. Unfortunately the online video content is only available to people in the US.
Now keep in mind that Boxee is still in the very early stages of development and does have many bugs. Also some functions of the software are not very intuitive on how to set up, namely the setting up of a networked hard drive that contains your media files. When Boxee does become open to the public it will still retain it’s Alpha status, but hopefully a beta will follow quickly.
Boxee can be downloaded at the official site.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning out that the online content is only available to residents of the USA at this point.
Boxee is fantastic. I seriously considering cutting my cable service and using Boxee and TiVo/Netflix as my sole entertainment options ( as long as Comcast does not cut off my broadband ).
[...] Boxee is becoming a public alpha on the 8th of January. You can read the story here: Boxee Soon to Open Its Doors to All | MacApper __________________ iMac Intel Core Duo 17" 1.83Ghz, 2GB Crucial RAM ::Twitter : Ben Drucker [...]
J.U. – I completely forgot to mention that Boxee online video content only works in the US. Thank you for posting that and reminding me.
Khürt Williams – I did just that. A couple months ago I canceled my Comcast digital cable and went with my AppleTV w/Boxee on it, and a Netflix subscription. So far it’s going great but I do miss watching hockey games. I am able to watch the local news using OTA HD.
J.U.-…
Screenshots makes me want to check out Boxee. Checking out now.
The first two paragraphs of your post was a waste of my time. Please be both adroit and expeditious next time.
I hate being restricted by Boxee. I would rather watch TV channels around the world and movies in 1080p Blu-ray on my PC and set top box on MyTVPAL ( mytvpal.com ) that’s made using Matrixstream ( matrixstream.com ) IPTV platform.
Michael Dunn
This is pretty funny … I guess Michael Dunn gets a kickback from Matrixstream and mytvpal. I’m sure he’s not biased at all.
This is pretty funny … I guess Michael Dunn gets a kickback from Matrixstream and mytvpal. I’m sure he’s not biased at all.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=%22Michael+Dunn%22+Matrixstream