Israeli media center start up Boxee is working hard at bringing the best TV experience onto the PC (or the Mac in this case…). The company has announced the release of Netflix for Boxee, probably one of the best ways to browse Netflix, with a media center experience. The new capabilities include the ability to browse, queue, and play streaming movies as well as the ability to explore the entire “Watch Instantly” selection by Genre.
According to the company’s release post, they could not make it run on Apple TV or Ubuntu. It appears that 1G Apple TV’s processor isn’t strong enough.
Several other content sources were included in the release:
- TheWB – shows like Angel, Buffy, Firefly, The O.C., Smallville, and In Living Color
- The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog – amazing photos from around the world
- MTVMusic – songs/artists in your collection are now linked with music videos
In additon to the content additions, Boxee through in a few bug fixes and new features:
- support for skip forward, rewind in Hulu, CBS
- improved streaming of podcast, trailers and youtube videos
- faster scanning of local/network media
- new on-screen keyboard and more.
- the PC version is coming! It’s currently being tested in pre alpha by 214 users. Hopefully, I’m on the shortlist to be included in the next batch (Avner/Andrew: Hint, Hint)
A picture is worth 1,000 words:
Boxee has recently raised $4M in funding and is still in alpha mode. Techcrunch credits the elegant media center design to the use of XMBC, open-source software that hacked the originial Xbox media center. The company was founded in 2007, has a headcount of 10 employees and is based in New York and Israel.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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