Boxee Gets ABC
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Minor confession: I’m not much of a watcher of current episodic network television. So even though I’m trying to do as much of my TV watching via Boxee’s media center software as possible, the fact that Boxee is adding Lost and ABC’s streaming shows to its lineup doesn’t mean much to me personally. I’ll be more psyched when more news and really old shows (What’s My Line, anyone?) are available.
But I’m still pleased by the ABC news: The biggest issue about Internet TV in general and Boxee in specific is that the selection of stuff is extremely scattershot, so the more quickly Boxee adds as much programming as possible, the better. It’ll be fabulous when there’s a way to get convenient access to all major-media streaming TV programming in one place, and it would be nifty if an inventive startup like Boxee got there first.
ABC is available in Boxee’s Mac version now; the company hopes to have it working in the Apple TV version in a few days; Linux and Windows support is in the works.
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ZNF ‘Round The Web Says:
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 pm[…] Boxee Gets ABC Of course the challenge with services like Boxee, PlayOn, NeurosLINK is keeping up with the providers since as far as I can tell the stuff is being scraped. And should the providers make a change, these other guys will need to race to keep up. PlayOn’s had one or two Hulu outages for example when Hulu changed their site somewhat. Ideally, all the networks get on Hulu. And then Hulu gets on a box. Every episode, every season. (Of course, licensing doesn’t work that way with the various guilds and entities that all must be paid at rates that slide around depending on length of availability, release timing, etc – no one can afford it all.) […]
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Quick Little Boxee Update « MyMediaMusings Says:
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm[…] Boxee Gets ABC […]
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Free Anti-Piracy Advice to NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX et. al. « MyMediaMusings Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 1:21 pm[…] Boxee Gets ABC (technologizer.com) […]
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Introducing Technologizer’s Digital Media Central | Technologizer Says:
February 4th, 2009 at 10:44 am[…] entertainment and other forms of content, from iPods and other media players to satellite radio to Internet TV to DV camcorders to media-savvy smartphones. The section will include news, reviews, and commentary […]
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Of course the challenge with services like Boxee, PlayOn, NeurosLINK is keeping up with the providers since as far as I can tell the stuff is being scraped. And should the providers make a change, these other guys will need to race to keep up. PlayOn’s had one or two Hulu outages for example when Hulu changed their site somewhat. Ideally, all the networks get on Hulu. And then Hulu gets on a box. Every episode, every season. (Of course, licensing doesn’t work that way with the various guilds and entities that all must be paid at rates that slide around depending on length of availability, release timing, etc – no one can afford it all.)
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Yes, Boxee does seem to be scraping (it’s not an exact mirror of Hulu.com, for instance–I’ll have more to say about that in future posts). But it’s pretty darn nifty, and I hope that they have their shot at being the major Internet TV aggregator. As far as I know, they don’t have explicit agreements with the companies whose video they’re providing an interface for today; it would be neat if they could do deals to guarantee the best possible experience…
–Harry
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:38 am
I am very impressed with Boxee. I have been hooking my Macbook to the TV for most of my TV viewing through Hulu and various other websites for some time now. Since Boxee has added Hulu I have been using it almost exclusively. I watched Lost on the ABC channel on Boxee last night. I even have an AppleTV ordered for the purpose of putting Boxee on it. I have not watched TV via cable for years, instead using bittorrent as my personal DVR, but subscribed to it because of my girlfriend need for user friendly options. We have now downgraded to basic cable (20 channels) in exchange for Boxee. This option still provides content holders with their ad revenue from me (bittorrenting has been very unnecessary for me lately) and lets us pay a lot less in monthly service fees. She thinks that Boxee is easy enough to use to cancel the cable, and not being a tech geek herself, I am impressed to see her get excited when new content comes to Boxee.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I got my invite for the Boxee alpha for windows. I am impressed with the video streaming from hulu.com. I tried out a episode of House & it looked like I got a hd stream.
As I emailed to a friend, boxee is an interfaced looking for a hardware platform. The login pops up a graphical keyboard as if it knows the app knows a remote would be hunt & peck in your password.
Otherwise the interface is very nice if not intuitive.