we are excited to announce that Showtime has decided to offer boxee users a sneak peek at their upcoming season premieres – even before they are available on TV!

we’re big fans of Showtime @boxee because of shows like Weeds, Dexter and Californication. can’t wait to have all these premiers in boxee. we are starting with  Showtime’s brand new show, Nurse Jackie starring 3-time Emmy Award winner Edie Falco.

you can watch the season premiere on boxee right now. go to the App Box, install Showtime Podcasts and you’re good to go.

P.S. i love the tag-line “life is full of little pricks”. insightful

P.P.S. if you’re in San Francisco on June 23rd come join us at the boxee event at 7pm.

Hulu just launched their own boxee-like application for watching Hulu content. the new downloadable application is built to be used from the couch with a remote.

we’re glad to see Hulu had a change of heart about bringing their service to the big screen, and we hope that this means Hulu content is coming back to boxee.

we’ve already put in a request to Hulu to work with them on bringing Hulu back to boxee, and we’ll let you know the response..

btw, Hulu: we would appreciate it if you remove the misleading message that you pop up to boxee users. boxee does not cause problems with the Apple Remote hardware. there is a setting in boxee (under Settings->System->Apple Remote) that lets the users decide whether they’d like boxee to always respond to the remote (so they can press the Menu button to launch it).

since we launched the app dev challenge i was itching to write an app myself. last night i was browsing the White House’s website and came across their Vimeo channel. it has some really great videos and they are all available in HD.

after i watched the video of Eric Lewis (aka ELEW) performing “Mr. Brightide” i felt compelled to write a White House channel app for boxee. (btw, you should also check out ELEW’s TED “talk”).

it took me 4 hours or so to get done. i didn’t have to write a single line of code in Python, i just copied and pasted stuff from the ThruYou, Current and NextNewNetworks apps. i think that next i may bring in photos from the White House Flickr stream, maybe updates from Twitter.

you can try out the White House app by installing it from the App Box (on the left menubar in boxee).

download the source code for the White House app: source code

the boxee dev challenge will have three of the most respected, followed, geeky, funny personalities on the Internet (and then there’s me…my wife thinks those things about me, not sure about anyone else)

when picking the judges we went through a rigorous process. we were looking for activist judges, driven by ideology and representing a narrow constituency of the public: geeks. we were not shy about using various litmus tests (such as “Mac or PC?”, “Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop?”, “how many PCI slots does your motherboard have?”, “how many TBs of storage do you have?”, “bawls or mana?”).

we are very happy and honored to have Cali Lewis, Chris Pirillo and Veronica Belmont as judges (Ryan Block will not be able to make it to the event, and Chris was kind enough to fill his spot).

about the judges (by order of number of Twitter followers):

Veronica Belmont

The rare offspring of style and geekiness, Veronica is the co-host of Revision3’s tech-centric show, Tekzilla, and Qore on the PlayStation Network. Previous to that, she hosted several other online video shows and podcasts, including Mahalo Daily, Buzz Out Loud, MP3 Insider, and Crave. She also created tech video content for CNET TV, including the popular series Prizefight.

Blog | Twitter

Chris Pirillo

The man behind Gnomedex, a constant lifestreamer, Internet Entrepreneur, Hardware Addict, Software Junkie, Book Author, Once TV Show Host (and marathon laugher), Technology Enthusiast, Shameless Self-Promoter, Tech Conference Coordinator, Early Adopter, Idea Evangelist, Tech Support Blogger, Bootstrapper, Media Personality, Technology Consultant, Thicker Quicker Picker Upper.

Blog | Twitter

Cali Lewis

A huge boxee fan and supporter, Cali Lewis is the host of GeekBrief.TV, a three to five minute video podcast, covering new technologies, consumer electronics, and Web 2.0 projects. Along with her husband, Neal Campbell, they started GeekBrief.TV on December 23rd, 2005. Five months later, they began producing the show full time with support from PodShow Network and advertisers. Cali has co-hosted Call For Help with Leo Laporte, and appears regularly on MSNBC and The Lab with Leo Laporte.

Blog | Twitter

as the developers are working on new boxee apps i wanted to give a quick update about the App Dev Challenge. 

see you at Mezzanine! – we were able to book Mezzanine in San Francisco as the venue for the event on June 23rd. following our meetup in Webster Hall in NYC, we thought we should find a similar place in San Francisco. 

how to build a boxee app – there are now two examples of boxee apps that could serve as a good starting point for building your own app. the first one is ThruYou and the second is songza. if you have any question about the API or the development process you can check out the boxee dev forum, or connect with idan on twitter.

Drobo + 4TB – our friends at Seagate are sponsoring 4TB of Barracuda drives for each of the 3 Drobos we are giving away at the event. Drobo + 4TB is my personal setup at home, connected to my Mac Mini over the network and serving all my videos, music and pictures. it is excellent!

ideas for boxee apps – want to build an app, but don’t have a specific idea? you can look at what people are asking for on getsatisfaction, search on twitter, look at services with open APIs, or just think of what you’d love to see on boxee and is not already there.  fred wilson will be happy to see someone build a La Blogoteque app.

working on a boxee app? let us know http://bit.ly/boxeedevchallenge

songza is the easiest way i know for finding any song, playing it, and sharing it. and now it’s on boxee!

as more developers are working on creating their first boxee apps we wanted to provide another example (first one was for ThruYou) of a boxee app built using the API. idan who is an avid songza user saw that they have a simple API and decided that it will make for a perfect boxee app.

we will work with lucas and his team on building the future versions of songza on boxee. so this release is just the beginning.

you can install songza on boxee by going to App Box->New Applications and choosing songza. it will then appear under Music>Internet (we’ll make it easier to add apps in the future…)

how idan built the songza app? read about it here.

the new boxee API enables developers to build and publish apps for boxee users. while people are working on a variety of boxee apps, we thought it would be a good idea to provide some extra incentive for the developers.

the boxee dev challenge will have 3 categories: Video, Music and Photos. 
in each category we will have a People’s Choice award and a Judge’s Choice award:

People’s Choice Award: Drobo + 4TB from Seagate
Judge’s Choice Award: Sony Bravia XBR9 46″

the deadline for submitting your application is June 14th at 11:59pm PT, but we encourage you to submit early and often as we’ll be talking up cool applications as they come in.
voting will take place between June 15th – June 22nd.

on June 23rd will have a boxee event in San Francisco (RSVP here) announcing the People’s Choice and our esteemed judges will choose a winner from the 10 most popular apps in each category.

the judges at the event will be:
Veronica Belmont - Tekzilla, Qore
Ryan Block - GDGT, former EIC Engadget
Cali Lewis – host of geekbrief.tv
Avner Ronen - boxee founder and CEO

looking for more info on how to develop boxee apps: check out http://developer.boxee.tv and take a look at the sample app (we will publish additional sample apps). please submit your app to dev_challenge@boxee.tv.

whether you’re a developer or just a boxee fan, we look forward to seeing you @ the event. RSVP here.

* the challenge is open to residents of the milky-way galaxy except for employees of boxee, and any other organizations involved in sponsoring the contest, as well as their parent, subsidiary, affiliated and successor companies, and those employees’ immediate family and household members. exceptions extend also to those who think they might become a boxee employee, or an employee of the aforementioned parent, subsidiary, affiliated, or succesor companies in the future. “Immediate family members” of employees shall mean their parents, step-parents, children, step-children, siblings, step-siblings, pets and spouses. “Household members” of employees shall mean people who share the employee’s residence at least three months a year sleeping on a couch or a bed (blow up mattresses do not ap.)