Boxee, an application that packs a punch!
Jon M. Cohen - Technology Consultant
Haven’t heard of Boxee yet; well get excited! Boxee is an application for both Ubuntu and Mac that offers a fully integrated media player and media manager. The biggest feature that Boxee offers users is a centralized way to watch web based primetime media.
Boxee is a simple and effective media application that allows home users to set up streaming for music, pictures, and movies. As well with its great interface, users can easily grab content from sites like Hulu, Fox, ABC, and CBS, just to name a few. Boxee gives you a nice centralized place to watch all the rich content that the web has to offer instead of going to individual websites of each broadcaster. It still allows for short web commercials, but adds improved picture and functionality such as pausing and adjusting the volume.
Most people love watching the rich web content and now Boxee has also integrated a full-featured media player, so organizing and sharing your home videos (movies), music, and photos is easy as pie. Just point Boxee to the network with the media and Boxee can do the rest. Sharing your network content is an effective and easy task when Boxee is involved.Screenshot of Boxee Movies
Another great feature that is available to Boxee users is the Boxee OS that can be loaded on the AppleTV. With the combination of Boxee to the AppleTV, we see a huge opportunity for great media viewing on your HDTV. This allows users to sit on the couch and really get involved with all of the content the web has to offer. While loading Boxee on the AppleTV does take a bit of work; a quick web search will lead you to the needed instructions.
You may be asking yourself what the down sides of Boxee are, and to be honest, there are a few. It should be noted Boxee is still an Alpha. The first thing I quickly noticed is that Boxee is slow to load and can be slow as you move through different menus. I have tested the Boxee application on the Mac and Ubuntu, as well as the AppleTV, and regardless of which platform I tested I always got the same results. The second point has to do with configurations. As I stated earlier, it is very easy to configure, but it falls slightly short in the depth of the security configurations that are able to be setup. The final issue that I found was related to the speed and quality of streaming. I found that I spent a lot of time waiting for the buffering. This was expected due to the upsizing of the video and general speeds of the internet, but it can be assumed that this third issue will quickly disappear as speeds on the internet increase and adopt new formats for web based rich video content.
Screenshot of Boxee TV options
Boxee is the premier application for absorbing your media on a daily basis. It is not perfect, but the innovations found in this application lead me to believe that it will be a very popular application in years to come. I also assume that we will see more hardware devices that Boxee will be able to work with. As the popularity grows and Boxee moves from Alpha to Beta and on to RC, I am sure that Boxee will be as well known a term as “TiVo”. Boxee really has endless potential; it will be great to see what the final application looks like. Do you want your own copy of Boxee? Click Here.