Boxee – TV Streamed the Right Way

Tom Long — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:07:01 +0000

Streaming television is a wonderful thing. When the DVR’s electronic program guide (EPG) is thrown off by a football game, you haven’t missed the show. Can’t afford the internet and cable TV? You haven’t missed the show (unless it’s The Mentalist). You can watch it online. I use them all: Hulu, Hulu Desktop, Clicker, TV Guide DVR, TV.com, FindInternetTV, and so on. I like Clicker the best. What I don’t like is leaving the media center-style 10 foot interface. I tried the alpha Boxee and found its merits outweighed by its shortcomings. But a new release deserves another chance, right? Good news. Boxee Beta is much easier to navigate. And the one area where every other media center comes up short, streaming TV shows, is where Boxee really shines. Watch the video after the break, to see what I mean.

While the new Boxee remote looks pretty awesome, I use the iPhone-iTouch app which is equally awesome. Navigation now is a snap.

Combine that with the Boxee Windows Media Center Plug-in. Into Boxee. Do your Boxee thing. Close Boxee. Automatically back in Windows Media Center.

From the Boxee.tv website, one can add feeds that will appear (beneath a stack of Boxee staff recommendations) in the Feeds column. There is a Featured column for featured content. There is a Queue column. Couple this with the Boxee bookmarklet. If you find a video you don’t have time to watch. Click the bookmarklet. It adds the video to your queue to watch later when you open Boxee. There is no better way I have found for watching internet TV or videos. Too bad CBS doesn’t make The Mentalist available online. Too bad the video quality of CBS streams is soooo poor. But if you’ve got a fast enough CPU and a decent chipset or graphics card, streaming TV looks pretty good in most cases.

The two biggest flaws in Windows Media Center are failure to scrape metadata for movies and poor Internet TV. The Boxee plug-in replaces the flawed internet TV interface beautifully. Congratulations to the Boxee team on a job well done. When they get their scraper issues and Feeds column straightened out, they will offer the perfect band-aid.

Boxee TV
iPhone-iTouch Boxee Remote app
Boxee Windows Media Center Plug-in
The Boxee bookmarklet
Boxee Box Remote (to be sold separately from the Boxee Box also)

TV Guide – A Streaming DVR

Tom Long — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:52:03 +0000

I love Hulu. Sadly it doesn’t carry about five of the shows I watch on TV.com. TV.com has it over Hulu in that it includes a viewing schedule with just the shows I’ve picked, but unlike Hulu it doesn’t notify me when there is something new or provide direct links to the fullest full episode. TV Guide now is offering a “DVR” service. Really it is a virtual DVR. The service appears to be offering an easy means of accessing media through their viewer as a portal to Hulu and other actual hosts. TV.Guide notifies you when a new episode of your shows is available and their access to shows is immediate. Unlike TV.com, one isn’t require to click the show in the schedule and then hunt down the latest full episode available.

The menu is easy to navigate and attractive. What could be better? Well, it would be better if the view offered high definition. In a random look at two shows I normally view in HD, only SD was offered. I expect they’ll do a better job of preventing people from using backdoor techniques to download the source video very soon. The good news is that now I receive notification when full episodes of all my shows are available for streaming. If you are an early adopter, let me know your experience in the comments. Will this be enough to wean you from the cable/satellite?

Long Story Short » streaming TV

Boxee – TV Streamed the Right Way

TV Guide – A Streaming DVR