Boxee Media Center Available in New Mac Version, With Streaming from ABC
by Sam Dean - Jan. 23, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
- Big Predictions, and a Hardware Announcement, From Boxee
- Boxee Investors See it As "Firefox for Media," Aiming High
- With New Funding in Tow, Boxee Will Head for CE Devices
- 10 Open Source Ways to Improve Your Online Video Mojo
- OStatic Buffer Overflow...
We've covered Boxee before. It's an interesting open source mashup of a sophisticated media center application that can run and organize videos, photos and more on the Mac, AppleTV, Windows (soon) and Linux, and a social networking application. Unlike your average media center application, Boxee is designed to let you share shows, videos, songs, playlists and more with friends. TheAppleBlog reported today on Boxee's plan to release a new update for their Mac version that allows users to stream content from ABC. The update is available for download now, and Mac users may definitely want to check this version of Boxee out. Here are more details.
 I've participated in several demonstrations of Boxee as it has gone through alpha testing, and found it to be a very interesting idea. In a similar spirit to the commenting and rating that goes on at YouTube, Boxee adds strong doses of social sharing fetures to the mix of video and music content that it serves up. The AppleBlog approached Boxee about why it is offering the new version capable of ABC streaming on the Mac platform first. These were the answers they got:
- Consistent hardware - The Mac is the easiest to program for because they know exactly what kind of hardware people are on.
- Macs work well with (and often come with) remotes.
- Half of Boxee users are using Boxee in conjunction with their big screen TV and an AppleTV. Since the majority of their users are on Mac, that was the platform they decided to launch ABC with (and the platform they initially launched Boxee on back in June).
- Last, but not least, they’re all on Mac and they like Apple products.
One of the interesting points there is that half of Boxee's existing users are on Mac systems. I know a few people who use it in conjunction with AppleTV and large screen TVs, and they love it. Boxee's release today is timed with the season premiere of the popular ABC show LOST, which will be available on ABC.com the day after the episode airs.
For more on Boxee, and another open source media center application--MythTV--see Kristin's posts here, and here.
