Boxee Reviewed and Invites

What is Boxee? Well, Boxee is a must have application for anyone who loves television, movies, music, and pictures. In a nut shell, Boxee is a beautifully designed application that was created bring your digital media content from your computer to your TV. Whether you download movies illegally, stream them from Netflix, or even pull them in from free online sources all over the net; Boxee will make life easier for you.

Design

One of the many things that makes Boxee stand out from it competitors is its design. Boxee was designed with ease of use, beauty, and the Apple remote all in mind. The ease of use factor is just that. It is easy to use. Menus are laid out nice and orderly. Everything is easy to find, from a TV show on your hard drive to a episode of The Office from Hulu.com. I pointed out beauty, because Boxee stays faithful the the Apple beautiful design principles. Buttons are very large and colorful, text has nice hover and glow effects, colors flow beautiful, and finally, slide transitions are used when switching from page to page. While these might not seem important to a review, I find design a major factor in how much I like an application.

The final design aspect I want point out is how well Boxee was designed for use with the Apple remote. Everything you need to do with Boxee can be done using the Apple remote. Browsing Movies and TV shows, adding Netflix movies to your queue, and setting up video podcast rss feeds can all be done using an Apple remote and on screen keyboard (only displays when needed.)

Functionality

Boxee is very diverse in the types of content you can use. When you first load Boxee, it will scan your computer to find Movies, TV Shows, Music, and Pictures. Then it will organize them in a very simple yet organized manner inside Boxee. Besides on computer content, you can listen to audio podcast and watch video podcast of your choice. Some podcast RSS feeds come preloaded, but you can add any of your favorites with the “Add RSS Feed” setting.

My favorite type of content is the streaming internet content. Boxee works with many different types on online stream able content. You can watch online content from Hulu, YouTube, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, and much more.

The most recent addition is Netflix Watch Instantly which I use a lot. I have been a Netflix subscriber for close to 4 years now and fell in love with the Watch Instantly content when it was released. With Boxee I can now have that content on my television.

Final Thoughts

Boxee is still in its Alpha stages so it does have some bugs, but overall it is a well built and beautifully designed application. I highly recommend it to people who love internet content especially video and wish to view it on their TV’s in the comfort of their living room. Boxee is currently only available for Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and Apple TV.

It is currently invite only, but I have a bunch of invites to give out. If you wish to check out the program, please leave a comment below. I will send the invite to the email associated with the comment.