I thought I was being weird and bleeding-edge by attempting to dump cable TV for watching sites like Hulu through Boxee’s open-source media center software on an Apple TV. But the New York Times has a nifty story today on Boxee and its fans–and once something’s in the Times, it’s presumably well on its way to going mainstream.The Times says that the Boxee-on-Apple TV software has been downloaded 100,000 times to date, which suggests that I have a lot of company already.

I’ll be writing more about my experiences soon, but my overarching takeaway at the moment is that Internet TV on a TV is, above all, different from cable–better in some respects, and worse than others. Of course, Internet TV is still busy being born–Hulu is less than a year old, and Boxee is still in alpha. Cable TV has a head start of a few decades. But if there’s one thing that undeniable about the Internet, it’s that it can catch up with old ways of doing things really quickly. And then go far beyond them…

 
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Read more: Apple TV, Boxee, Internet TV, New York Times