My friend turned me on to the Boxee Meetup last night at Webster Hall. I had never heard of Boxee before, but after hearing Anvers (Boxee CEO) demo the product and talk about the features in the upcoming beta, I am sold.
If you’ve never heard of Boxee, let me give you my synopsis of what they’re doing. Boxee is designed to enable internet content providers (like Hulu, Pandora, NextNewNetworks, and Blip.tv) to reach more customers by creating a platform that gives users the “10 foot experience.” That is, a great user experience when you’re sitting back on your couch and have your respective device hooked up to your TV using a remote control. Currently, Boxee supports Apple, Apple TV, and Ubuntu in a public alpha and Windows in a private pre-alpha. I attempted to sign up for the Windows pre-alpha last night and hopefully I’ll have more details to share soon.
Ok, so now you know about Boxee. But wait, there’s more. Last night they made a series of announcements that got me really excited about their platform. The released a Pandora integration that was built with their new set of developer APIs. I haven’t had a chance to look at the APIs first hand yet, but it seems like it should be relatively straight forward to enable audio/video content providers (as well as maybe interactive content providers like game emulators) to build new applications and experiences on the platform. They also made a series of feature announcements about the beta that I’m not going to hold my breath for because they haven’t announced a release date and didn’t even have any mockups to show. To their credit though, they’ve already got a great product, so I’m just excited to try to get it running on my Windows-based Shuttle.
You can check out more about Boxee at http://www.boxee.tv