In its Alpha days, Boxee had a feature that easily let you add RSS video feeds. So as one SNB Forums poster commented, you’ll acually end up watching more commercials using Internet TV (at least using Boxee) than you will by using your cable / satellite DVR.Īs big as Boxee’s bundled TV Shows selection is, there are plenty of networks and channels missing. Most everything is "Ad supported" and, of course, you can’t skip the ads. In some cases, you are presented with multiple sources for a show, usually Hulu and the content owner’s site. The TV Shows include many, but not every, show offered by the content owners represented, which include NBC Universal (and its NBC and SyFy and USA cable properties), CBS, ABC, Fox, PBS and Comedy Central. When you select a show, the screen scrolls left to hide the filters and expose a description of the show. The only sorts available are Most Popular and Recently Added, the latter of which refers to when the show was added, not new show episodes. The left column contains filters and a Search function for locating desired content. There’s only one queue and you can’t control the sort. The Queue column is the one area that you control by tagging content that you want to watch. This will probably be a source of income for Boxee, who may eventually charge content partners to put items there or use it to sell pay-for apps. The Featured column is totally controlled by Boxee and does change from time to time. This is tending to annoy users (me included) because you currently have no control over the column and can’t even shut it off. But it seems like that "friend" has lost interest because it hasn’t changed in the weeks that I’ve been using Boxee on and off. It currently contains whatever the default boxee staff "friend" decides to put there. The Feed column is where you see content from social networking sources. The Boxee home screen is currently divided into four sections, a main activity bar across the top and three content-related sections: Feed Featured and Queue. I downloaded the most recent "beta" for Windows (boxee-0.1) and installed it on both the Acer Revo 1600 (XP Home SP3) and an Acer Aspire 1810T notebook (Win 7 Home Premium, 64 bit). And that is just one of the problems standing between Boxee and success. The problem is that Hulu seems like it hasn’t decided yet which partners it wants, if any at all. It’s fair to say that, currently, any Internet TV solution’s success is tied to its ability to source content from Hulu. Note that the above list doesn’t contain Hulu, which is a Frankensteinish creation of NBC Universal, News Corp. The bad news is that having to remember which program / service is used for what content is not conducive to a high WAF! The good news is that by using a computer instead of a dedicated media player appliance, accessing multiple sources is as easy as finding an application (or service) that has the desired content and loading it up. So we’re forced to use multiple sources to scavenge all the shows we currently watch. That is, unless you pay for the privilege by signing up for the TV Everywhere scam service I covered in Part 2. the cable, satellite (and to a lesser extent) telecom providers like AT&T and Verizon, content owners’ own web video experiments and independent Internet-based distributors such as Netflix, MediaMall Technologies’ PlayOn and Boxee.Īs a result, there is no one legal place on the Internet where you can access the same content that you can get from the cable, TV and telecom folks. The battle is still raging among content creators, their established distribution channels, i.e. Unfortunately, for Internet TV, this is going to be difficult at best. So I’ve decided to try to model the DVR experience as much as possible in whatever solution I come up with. The basic mechanics are easy to master and we manage to keep up with the recorded programs so that we seldom need to weed through the queue to kill off programs before the DVR does it on its own. With the ability to automatically record anything we want to watch, we almost never watch live TV. SmallNetBuilder, or more to the point, what she will do to me if I screw up access to her favorite shows.Īnyone with a DVR-even the crappy, non-Tivos built into most cable and satellite boxes-knows how they transform the TV watching experience. I’ve also been thinking more about what I’m about to do to Ms. It’s really helped to refine my thinking on the direction I’m heading in. This time I’m going to get into some of the details that have convinced me to not make Boxee the centerpiece of my Internet TV experience.īut first, thanks again for the feedback that you’ve sent in. Last time, I talked a bit about Boxee and how it proved to be too much for the Acer Revo 1600 I’d bought on impulse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |