Boxee has generated a great deal of interest lately, as its
public battle with online TV provider
Hulu has provided more than one "three snaps in
zig-
zag formation" type reaction over the past month.
Hulu, a joint online venture between Fox and NBC provides free streaming access to shows on those networks as well as their affiliates and associated partners. The content comes with short commercial breaks, hence the free nature. The service has become extraordinarily popular as it provides a fairly high quality viewing experience, on demand, FOR FREE.
Enter
Boxee.
Boxee for those unfamiliar, is a free media center software package that currently runs on Mac and Linux builds and is essentially an
aggregator of all the free video and audio content available on the web. Its slick interface, social networking tilt, and ease of use has made it popular with many streaming media lovers. What's more,
Boxee created a straightforward process to load its software onto Apple TV devices, providing a great source of media to those users as well. With
Hulu being an
Internet media streamer and
Boxee being a streaming media
aggregator...it seemed like a tiny thing for
Hulu content to reside in the
Boxee interface for all to enjoy. After all...you still watch the show with all the provider's intended commercials, what could go wrong? Well, in a word...everything.
Hulu (read: Fox and NBC) have waged a technical war of hack and defend upon
Boxee to block their software from providing content to their users.
Boxee has retorted by working around the
hindrance only to be blocked again. Only time will tell if NBC will come to its senses and realize that
Boxee is driving more users to its content (and ads) than before.
Regardless..with or without
Hulu,
Boxee is an amazing piece of software. The ability to utilize the Apple remote to control, pause, and rewind content is a welcome addition. The ability to link
Boxee to Twitter and
FriendFeed while keeping your
Boxee friends abreast of your recommended shows is a nice feature as well. For me, this is the future of media distribution. I'm willing to watch a commercial here and there (breaks are usually a single commercial) for the flexibility both
Hulu and
Boxee provide. The ability to provide on-demand content from major media sources at any time, on any network enabled device is
extraordinarily powerful. In fact, as a self described TV
junky...I'm feeling more attached to
Boxee and my laptop than I am to my
DVR.
Tomorrow, Apple will be outlining the new features in its latest major revision of the iPhone OS. I'll stop by tomorrow evening to give my thoughts...
Boxee has generated a great deal of interest lately, as its public battle with online TV provider Hulu has provided more than one "three snaps in zig-zag formation" type reaction over the past month. Hulu, a joint online venture between Fox and NBC provides free streaming access to shows on those networks as well as their affiliates and associated partners. The content comes with short commercial breaks, hence the free nature. The service has become extraordinarily popular as it provides a fairly high quality viewing experience, on demand, FOR FREE.
There are a lot of social networking sites out there. Like, WAY too many. Unfortunately, this means that you likely don't keep up with every one of your friends through the same site, necessitating many different accounts. Each service has the ability to integrate with others (for example, twitter can simultaneously update Facebook) but you'd need a 350 million dollar Visio diagram to remember how it all fits together. If you're like me, this means you update Facebook by default and tend to neglect MySpace, Twitter, etc. Do not fear, Ping.fm is here to help. A web based aggregator designed to stitch together every imaginable IM, blog, and social networking site, ping.fm allows you to update each and every one in a single step. Ping.fm has a staggering list of supported sites, but major players are Facebook, FriendFeed, MySpace, flickr, linkedin, blogger, twitter...you get the idea. The service allows you to update via SMS, email, and IM in addition to the web portal, but you can also utilize a mobile application created by Curious Squid called Pingle. Pingle is one of the better Ping.fm implementations around, providing a quick way to update your services by category, (blogs, social networks, microblogs, etc.) or by single service. The app also shows you history and allows you to integrate photos and location into your updates or "pings". For instance, you can take a photo and add it to your facebook, myspace, twitter, and flickr pages all in one step. I'm not sure that demand can sustain the myriad sites that exist in these spaces, but in the interim aggregator sites like Ping.fm and FriendFeed can quickly make you a more efficient social butterfly.
Back in the day, the computer sitting on your desk wasn't a computer at all. Mainframe terminals of the day ran very simple client software designed to simply connect, receive and send information, all in glorious shades of, well...just green. In fact, little of the horsepower was local, but resided inside a data center far away...sort of, like...I don't know...a cloud? Sound familiar?
