The last few weeks I've been trying out a new service. In short, Boxee empowers your living room TV. Basically it composes of two parts: An application to view movies, locally or over the Internet and a community which lets you share what you've watched with your friends, much like Last.fm.
The application is pure gold. It scrapes your harddrive and selected network resources for video, pictures and music. Through a sleek interface you can then easily browse through your content, play movies, listen to music or play photo slideshows. But it doesn't stop there. The guys at Boxee has connected the application to various online content, be it Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, mixing mentos and coke on YouTube or a sucky 70's martial arts movie (public domain through a built in torrent downloader). In all it's a very full application.
The community is still a rough diamond. Clearly this is where Boxee will have the most impact. Having tried other full TV oriented applications like Joost, Boxee has the potential to build a much more interesting community. Since I can provide my own content to the recommendation engine Boxee has the potential for being as useful as Last.fm for content discovery, something that really, really sucked while using Joost, YouTube, et.al.
Using Boxee makes two things obvious to me:
First, it's all about the content. And Boxee provides the content for you, through your collections, the internet or your friends recommendation. No more dull moments.
Secondly, community is so powerful. The Boxee dashboard is a fluid view of what your friends have watched and recommends, and a great way to finding interesting content. Add some intelligent matching to this and no more being slave under the TV guide.
Boxee is alpha, but already useful. I'm missing some features like seamless integration with iTunes and iPhoto. However my general feeling about it is that Boxee might very well be the one killer application for the living room computer. It's very powerful and has so much potential. I'm just in love, and hoping that it keeps developing as quickly as to date.
Visit the Boxee website at: www.boxee.tv. Leave a comment if you want an invite.
