Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it.  And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino.  We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then.

Now there is a new version of Apple TV coming out and the Boxee Box is launching in November.

We think people want to be able to watch anything that they can watch on their computer, only on their bigscreen TV.  There is an overwhelming consumer expectation that the content we can consume in our cubicles, our dorm rooms, and in our laps should be available in our living rooms, in full 1080p with a gorgeous interface.  It’s a simple premise, but the challenge is to do it in a way that makes sense in that space, so you can put your feet up, grab a remote and start watching. No keyboards, mice, windows or labyrinthine menus. It should be calm and it should be beautiful. And it *must* be open.

We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms.  We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want.

We think it’s worth it.

Since the launch of the Boxee Beta in January, users been vocal about their love of the TV Show Library – one place to search and browse full-length TV Shows from major networks across the web. For episodic content online, we think it’s the best experience you’ll find.

Today we’re adding the foundations of a new Movie Library to complement the TV Show Library. This new Movie Library includes thousands of films from four great launch partners: EZTakes, Indie Movies Online, MUBI* and Openfilm. Most of these movies are available for free (supported by ads).  Explore each service’s catalogue using the ‘filter by provider’ option on the Movie Library sidebar.

While it’s still a little rough around the edges, here’s a quick peek at what you’ll find from each provider:

EZTakes

No more searching high and low for art house, independent, classic and cult films, because EZTakes specializes in bringing hard-to-find movies to you. The EZTakes library contains nearly a thousand ad-supported titles ripe for the picking that you can watch on Boxee or virtually any computer, smart phone or portable video player.

IndieMoviesOnline

Since June 2009, IndieMoviesOnline has been streaming high quality independent films, documentaries, and shorts. Known for its fierce movie reviews and behind-the-scenes editorials of all the top box-office hits (and flops), IndieMoviesOnline delivers films from both mainstream talent and hot up-and-comers. With free access anywhere on the globe to hundreds of movies, there’s no excuse not to soak up these great indie flicks.

MUBI*

MUBI is your online cinema, anytime, anywhere. MUBI will give you the latest buzz from Cannes or a restored masterpiece personally chosen by Martin Scorsese (he’s a member, too!). A social network that can let you find a visual gem that will definitely not be released in the local multiplex, and allows you to find a girl in Tokyo who loves Kubrick (she actually exists, her name is Yuko and she’s into Wong Kar-Wai too…).
*NB: to access MUBI on Boxee, you’ll need to pair your account first.

OpenFilm

Openfilm.com is a fast-growing online community where filmmakers and film lovers around the globe discover and distribute independent film. Through its unique technology, live online chats, social network, extensive film festival database, unique member channels, and Advisory Board, which includes James Caan, Robert Duvall, Mark Rydell and Scott Caan, Openfilm unites the best elements of the film industry in one place.

The Movie Library makes it easy to find, watch, or queue movies you like. Moving forward, it will include movies from additional online movie services and directly from studios, so while the movie selection will grow, the experience and ease of discovery will remain the same.

So just to recap:

• Boxee now has a movie library
• it has thousands of movies from multiple sources
• the movie library has titles available for users around the globe
• we’re still making tweaks (images, film count, etc.)
• we’ll be adding more movies and services soon.

As always, this latest version of the Boxee Beta also includes many bug fixes (more than 100 in this latest build).  Versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux are available now while the AppleTV version will be updated next week (we’re getting to it as quickly as we can!).

Download the latest version here for free.

Sincerely,
Andrew & Team Boxee

Don’t you hate it when you’re with a group of friends who are debating politics and business, and you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about?  You just smile and nod (or frown and nod, depending on the subject matter), waiting for the right moment to jump in and change the subject to something with a little less Condi and a little more Snooki.  Well, you’ll never have to be left out of those conversations again because Boxee’s full of newsy goodness.

Boxee’s arsenal of news apps features free on-demand videos from top-tier sources like The Washington Post, CNN, The Associated Press, and The Onion, ensuring you’re up to date on the latest news (even if it’s fake).  The Washington Post gives you your fill of national politics, while the Associated Press shows you top stories from across the globe.  You can also tune into CNN to watch their whole lineup of on-demand web videos.  If, after all that, the real world’s getting you down, then tune into The Onion for a nice, hearty chuckle.  In fact, The Daily Show and Colbert Report in Boxee’s TV Show Library will also do the trick.

Today, we’re introducing Livestation to the bunch. Livestation delivers live news from BBC, Al-Jazeera, France 24, and Frontline, among other international news channels.  The best part of Livestation is that there’s something for everyone, no matter where you are on the globe; just click a channel and watch without fear of being geolocked out. Honestly, I’m thrilled to finally be able to watch BBC Persian over the web instead of with my previous set-up, which was anything but ideal (let’s just say it involved a Pringles can, a taped up composite cable wayyyy past its prime, a screechy satellite dish passed on from a cousin’s cousin’s friend of a friend, and my darling grandmother yelling at the newscasters).  The Livestation app and its free channels are available on all versions of Boxee, but its premium channels are only open to Mac and Linux users for now (don’t worry, Windows, we’re opening up Livestation’s premium content to you soon). Search for “live tv news” in the App Library to find the Livestation app on Boxee.

The news on Boxee means watching the stories you choose from the sources you want, the same way you watch everything else on Boxee: free, web-sourced, and kinda sexy.  To start educating yourself on world happenings, tune into the news on Boxee today.  After five minutes of watching, you’ll be the one driving those fancypants political and scientifical conversations (and before you know it, you’ll be making up words).

Today we’re announcing a new partnership with Sonic Solutions, the guys behind RoxioNow, who are the guys behind digital delivery for companies like Best Buy (CinemaNow), Blockbuster, and Lionsgate to name a few. That’s a a lot of guys (and girls too), and we don’t want you to miss out on any of them.

This alliance with Sonic will enable us to partner with some of the best known content providers and deliver more premium content on Boxee over the coming months.  As users, we’re huge believers in the power of choice – we want you to be able to use any web service you’d like on Boxee to view content and this partnership opens a big door to making that possible.  RoxioNow serves a broad range of premium content to a growing ecosystem of home and mobile devices including PCs, connected TVs, set-top DVRs, Blu-ray Disc players, smartphones, and mobile devices.

We will be licensing Sonic’s RoxioNow entertainment platform across all Boxee-enabled devices to let us partner with companies who can deliver huge catalogues of digital content including brand new movie releases to users in HD with 5.1 surround sound.  Stores powered by RoxioNow enable users to instantly rent and purchase content to be watched watch on multiple devices so eventually you’ll be able to purchase a movie on Boxee through a RoxioNow store, then watch it on multiple devices in your house or on the go.

While the platform integration with RoxioNow is already in the works, you’ll begin to see RoxioNow partner content appear on Boxee over the coming months… and in time for the Boxee Box by D-Link launch.

-Andrew

Earlier this week we got confirmation that the Boxee Box by D-Link will ship this November in US and Canada. We realize many of you have waited months to purchase the Boxee Box, and we know how frustrating this is. Believe us when we say that both Boxee & D-Link want to start selling Boxee Boxes yesterday.

The original plan was to have the Box out by the end of Q2 (i.e. just about now), but that time-frame proved overly ambitious.

Our vision is to make the Boxee experience on a set top box as good as (and where we can, better than) the one you already know on a PC. The goal is to play HD videos from the web or a local network in 1080p and use hardware acceleration whenever possible. And to provide a TV browser experience that can handle almost everything you throw at it, including Flash 10.1. Not to mention making all this happen for an affordable price and on a quiet device that will not feel obsolete 12 months after you buy it.

We are looking forward to the  November launch with D-Link and believe it will deliver a user experience that sets the standard for accessing stuff from the Internet and from your home network on your TV.

Moving forward we want to keep you up to date so we will share progress via Boxee’s Development Blog and the Boxee Box by D-Link Fan Page on Facebook.
In the meantime, it feels good to have a date set for the release of the Boxee Box, and we can’t wait to get it to you.

My Damn Channel and it’s cavalcade of award winning shows have just stormed the beaches at Boxee.

With over 1500 original videos, My Damn Channel makes Miley Cyrus look like a peanut with comedy from huge names like David Wain, Sarah Silverman, Illeana Douglas, the Sklar brothers, Harry Shearer, and Coolio to name a few.  They’ve even got a channel dedicated to all original music run by Don Was. My Damn Channel acts as both an entertainment studio that creates its own content and as a new media platform empowering comedians, musicians, and filmmakers to co-produce, distribute, and monetize original episodic video.   All you really need to know they make fresh original videos you can now enjoy from your couch thanks to Boxee.

As part of their launch on Boxee, My Damn Channel has given us exclusive off-site rights to the latest episode of David Wain’s award winning series Wainy Days for the next week!  While many say the show is David Wain’s excuse to make out with a myriad of beautiful women like Amanda Peet and Elizabeth Banks, others know that Wain has played a key role in crafting some of the most original comedies of the past 15 years including The State, MADtv, Stella, Strangers with Candy, and movies like Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer.  Wain is just one of the stars that’s chosen to call My Damn Channel home, which is why we see My Damn Channel as one of the leaders challenging traditional TV distribution.

You can see the new video with Megan Mullally (best known as Karen from Will & Grace) right now on Boxee – check out the featured section on your Boxee home page!

Outside of Wainy Days my favorite has to be You Suck at Photoshop! – never before have photoshop tutorials, drama, and comedy been so well dodged, burned, and blended. Check it out now on the My Damn Channel App for Boxee.

I’m a music-lover. For three years I put together a music podcast to highlight my favorite music across many genres. I explored high and low for new songs on Pandora, Slacker, We are Hunted, HypeMachine, Lala, The Sixty One, Beatport, 7 Digital, NPR, and Last.Fm.  I searched for killer mixes on Hybridized.org (Jody Wisternoff from Way Out West is my favorite here), Mixcloud, and the essential mixes & friday night bangers from the BBC (thanks Pete Tong & Annie Mac!).  But while all these services do a great job of helping you discover new bands and mixes, none have created an experience around live music concerts like Wolfgang’s Vault.

Think of Wolfgang’s Vault like that amazing local record store run by the friendly man that knows more about music than you ever could because he’s lived it.  He’s done the concerts, the VIP rooms, the backstage parties, the hotel parties, and the chance encounters.  In my home town of Dallas, the man is Bill Wisener who has run Bill’s Records (and tapes, and CDs, and posters) for as long as I can remember.  On the Internet that man is Wolfgang, and you now have access via Boxee to his collection of rare and vintage concerts as well as from bands on tour now.

Wolfgang’s Vault on Boxee propels you into a world of 60’s psychadelic rock, amazing vintage jazz, “tear the roof off this mother” funk, current Indie rock idols, and amazing concerts from the 80s.  Wolfgang has generously picked out some of his favorites in the featured section.  Wolfgang’s Vault aficionados can search for their favorite concerts or play directly from their personal playlists on the site.  For those who hate making choices, you can just turn on Wolfgang’s Vault radio and let the music wash over you – including sessions from famed DayTrotter Studios in Rock Island, IL.  Oh, and did we mention all of this is free?

Sign up for an account with Wolfgang’s Vault and relive all those musical moments you might have missed.

This week Idan descends on the boardrooms of Britain.

Since the Beta launch back in January , we’ve been working feverishly on software for the Boxee Box (we promise an announcement is coming soon), improving the general Boxee experience and adding more content to the mix.  We created the TV show library and added content from companies like the MLB, NHL, Crackle and we’ve got a full pipeline through the fall for adding more.

Unfortunately, as I found out on my recent trip to Israel,  much of this exciting content is not available to our friends across the pond. It’s time to address that.

With the help of our  friends at Brightcove, we have gathered some of the premiere content owners in the UK. Idan Cohen, co-founder and Boxee’s Head of Platform, (@idancohen) is packing his bags as we speak to travel to London in the hopes of adding as many of them as we can to Boxee.  In the next 6 months we hope to see more great UK applications like the BBC iPlayer running on Boxee.

Wanna meet Idan?  He’ll be speaking at the London Brightcove developer group meetup.

For those of you who might not know the difference between British and American content, we defer to British Transvestite Savant / Marathon Man Eddie Izzard.

We’re happy to announce today that Boxee users can now share recommendations with Google Buzz.

Since the official Google Buzz launch back in February, the platform has gained momentum with Gmail users who share status updates, photos, videos and more with friends on the social platform.  Google has done a great job of making the interface flow nicely, and it integrates well with Google Reader and Gmail. If you’re not a Buzz user,  you’ve most likely seen Google Buzz buttons popping up on some of your favorite sites next to Twitter’s “tweet this” and Facebook’s “like” buttons.  It was time to bring Buzz to Boxee.

Today at Google’s I/O Conference, Google introduced a brand new Google Buzz API. Boxee has been working with Google to help test the API and today we’re ready to introduce an exciting new application. Boxee users will be able to share what they’re watching with friends on Google Buzz and to import their Buzz feed into Boxee to watch video from their friends.  Now you can see video recommendations from friends on Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and Boxee itself… it’s like being able to channel surf through water-cooler conversation from your couch.

Link your Google Buzz account from Boxee’s services page and try it out for yourself.

A few months ago we told you we wanted to give you more access to premium content on Boxee (in addition to what’s currently free), and we wanted to give content owners new ways to offer and price content.  Today we’re excited to announce we’ve taken a big step forward choosing Vindicia as our payments platform provider.

Vindicia’s CashBox solution will enable Boxee content partners to offer premium content through a wide variety of payment methods and plans, from individual pay-per-view charges to premium subscription models.  Vindicia’s flexibility will enable Boxee content partners to price and package their content as they wish, whether it is premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never made it “on air.”  Users will be able to purchase this content via credit card, gift card, or PayPal.

The unique solution, which handles currency exchanges, VAT, and GST automatically, will be available to content providers worldwide.  Vindicia already powers great experiences for online gaming (Blizzard), online stores (deviantArt.com), and subscription software (Symantec) and we’re excited to be working with them to build an awesome experience on Boxee.

Lastly, while Boxee plans to make the payment platform available to content partners for Boxee’s unique TV experience, Vindicia’s flexibility also makes it possible for us to enable payments on our website and across mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and iPad.  Boxee’s eventual expansion to these platforms will pave the way for universally accessible content no matter where a user is (we love this idea!).

We will release the Boxee payment platform by the end of the summer.