Boxee Alpha: Web Video on Your TV is Finally Here

It’s not every day that you fall in love. And today, I fell in love with a new web video viewing program called Boxee. I signed up to be an alpha tester in 2008 and got my official invite in December. It was only after reading an article in the New York Times today that I finally decided to try it. The reason I didn’t earlier was due to several factors:

1. Hulu is amazing. Great content, great interface, and high resolution videos. Why would I need anything else?
2. I had been grossly disappointed by Joost’s debut in 2007 and subsequent web-based version in 2008.
3. MythTV sounds like a good idea for a DVR, but it is rather cumbersome to set up (like most open source projects). I thought this program would be the same.

I signed up for an account, downloaded the file, installed the program, opened it… and fell head over heels for it.

After spending several hours testing the program, I came up with some of my favorite things about Boxee and a list of features that need to be improved and/or added.

Here are the reasons I’m in love:

THE INTERFACE

Dead simple, luscious, intuitive, and fast. Each screen provides you with just enough information without overwhelming you with unnecessary meta info or buttons. The colors and the flow from screen to screen is so visually stimulating that it is fun unto itself. There are little sounds that make you aware that you’re flipping through items (similar to TiVo). Now, when I say INTUITIVE, I mean that Boxee’s development team spent a lot of time thinking about how to flow between different pages. The user is able to control operations (I tested on a computer keyboard) using only the arrow keys (this would be a joy stick on any TV remote), the ENTER key (most likely the “select” key on a TV remote), the escape key (a “back button” of sorts) and the space bar (”play/pause” button). THAT IS ALL you need to control this program. Ditch your mouse when you use it on your computer. Funny story: after using Boxee for two hours, I did a Google search in Firefox. After the results appeared, I wanted to use the arrow keys to move down to the entry! Why isn’t this a standard feature in web browsers yet for search engines? It is perfect.

THE CONTENT

Boxee is able to pull from almost every major video portal you can think of on the Internet. It loads the videos FASTER than if you were to use a web browser and the best part is that you can play then pause something and move to a different system screen to view other material without having to click away from the active video. Right now, you can view Hulu in 480p so long as you log into your Hulu account and have it pre-set to always display high resolution video. YouTube… is getting there. Boxee will support HD YouTube soon I’ve been told (through Twitter by the Boxee team). A really amazing feature is that you can add custom RSS feeds of videos/audio from other sources and then view it from within Boxee. Therefore, while other companies are working on adding themselves to Boxee as actual program buttons, you can just make your own channels using RSS.

GETTING BOXEE ON YOUR TV

If you’ve got a laptop, just get the proper cable to connect it to your television. Ideally, you’d want to get an HDMI or DVI cable that can plug into your HDTV. Boxee can do playback of 720p and 1080p (I was able to watch Apple movie trailers in 1080p on my screen). This system is impossibly simple. Just plug it in and go. The really great part is that you can add “custom sources” to your Boxee profile so that it can draw movies from Torrents, RSS feeds, and even hard drives on your network. Netflix streaming is also possible (however, I have not gotten it to work yet. I continue to get an error when I press play… hey, it’s Alpha testing).

Here are some things that I’d like to see added/changed:

FRIENDING

I’m not sure how this works, but someone friended me right away and there is no way for me to “accept/ignore.” This guy just showed up and now I see his “recommendations” all the time. Go away! I can’t even remove him.

SHARING

At present, the only way to say to someone, “Hey, watch this video,” is to send it to one of your Boxee friends. Of course, you could put out the RSS feed of your recommendations so people can see, but really, who has time to read through your log of recommendations? What really needs to be on the screen is a button that let’s you share the link through Facebook and other services just like traditional web video sites presently do.

YOUTUBE INTEGRATION

The YouTube within Boxee is rather snappy; however, it is NOT easy to see the video content from your own YouTube subscriptions. I just want to see videos produced by channels I subscribe to. Right now, that is not possible. Once Boxee nails that one, they’ll really have a killer app.

…those are actually my only qualms at this time. Obviously, there are some other quirks like how some network video players don’t communicate all that well with Boxee (I’m looking at you WB Network).

The other night I went to an industry mixer for Web TV Producers sponsored by TubeFilter in Los Angeles and got a sense of how web-based production is pushing aside traditional media (or “classic” as the new media people were calling them that evening) to the point that someone, like me, could make a 12 episode show at $10,000 an episode (that’s peanuts in comparison to what real shows are made for) and then use the Internet to distribute it. Boxee IS going to be the program that finally brings the web to your TV.

My only recommendation is that Boxee, for their own sake and for all of the web series producers out there, needs to create a standard video box that people who don’t want to fool around with Linux or plugging their laptop into their TV screen can PURCHASE for $100 or less. (Reading through the forums is a classic scenario of all the boys talking shop/smack about computers.) In addition, get the software on XBox, Wii, and PS3. Unless you have a laptop with a good graphics card (raise your hand if your laptop can’t play full screen 720p without jittering), a DVI output (currently, this is only standard on Mac laptops), Boxee will never get the market share it needs to take off.

As a rising new media producer, Boxee excites me as I finally see a delivery system that can bring web video into the living room (something that the Media PC never did). It’s nice to be in love.

More information on Boxee at http://boxee.tv