We’re excited to announce Jamie Divine has joined Boxee as Director of User Experience. Jamie formerly led visual design at Google and helped scale one of the biggest brands in the world. He is responsible for incalculable amounts of user happiness.

At Google, he contributed to 33+ product launches, three major redesigns across Search, Apps, and Mobile, and countless experiments. He set a high standard for usability with best of breed products across several categories.

What makes Jamie special is his passion for creating technology experiences that people love. This expertise is important to us because Boxee represents the future of TV when there is no TV — instead, just various screen sizes and modalities — when new concepts for enjoying media will need to be invented. In this frontier, we’ll depend on Jamie to architect an experience that is seamless, joyful, clever and deserving of our users’ affection.

Boxee and New York City +1.

It’s springtime, and in the animal world that means it’s time to come out of hibernation, time for leaves to grow back, and time for humans to start enjoying saturday afternoons at the park and preparing for the Stanley Cup®.  It’s also time to update you on a fresh new version of Boxee.

NHL GameCenter LIVE™ on Boxee

First and foremost we’re excited to announce that NHL GameCenter LIVE™ is now available on Boxee.  Subscribers to the monthly/annual subscription service ($19.95 / $79 respectively) can now watch great Hockey games & fights in HD (where available) on Boxee.

With the new application, users can enjoy live and archived games (48 hours after they air where available). We hope to add more of the advanced features in times for the 2010-2011 season.  All games are subject to blackouts and other restrictions.

and now some legal stuff… NHL, the NHL Shield and the word mark and image of the Stanley Cup are registered trademarks and NHL GameCenter Live is a trademark of the National Hockey League.  All Rights Reserved.

Boxee Beta Updates

In addition to this great new content partnership, we are also releasing the next version of the Boxee Beta, which now includes:

File Identification Progress

Easily see how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize within your media collection.  Check the status from any menu sidebar (TV shows, Movies, Music) or from the Media settings menu (Settings -> Media).

Manual Movie & TV Show identification
Help Boxee identify your personal media by telling it what’s in your collection.  To change incorrectly labeled files select the movie or TV show, then click the “drivers license with a circle in the top right corner”  icon on the right end of the pop-up menu.

Find and identify unresolved files by going to the “Files” menu, and selecting the “unresolved” folder from the bottom of the list.  Select files and follow the instructions above to label them properly.  You’ll now be able to put in movie names and TV show seasons and episodes to ensure your collection is pristine.

Facebook & Twitter in your Boxee feed
In addition to pushing recommendations to your social networks, you can see recommendations from friends on Facebook & Twitter from within Boxee.  Shared videos appear automatically in your feed with an icon on the right to let you know where they are from.  Set up this new option from the web in your service settings for Facebook & Twitter.

New & Improved RSS Management
We’ve created a brand new way to manage, discover and play RSS feeds in Boxee.  First, check out the new management & discovery console on our website.  Search, arrange by category or sort through the most popular, top rated, new, and HD feeds available on Boxee.  Then use the RSS feeds App to play back your favorites.

Bug Fixes and Fixes and Fixes, and Fixes!
We’ve been able to address hundreds of bugs in this version of Boxee.  Thanks to everyone who helped us out by submitting issues to our support team.

Download the latest version of Boxee here.

Last month at the Academy Awards, the world watched as Hollywood directors, actors, grips, sound engineers, et al. received awards for movies released over the past year.

This Sunday, a different audience will watch as that video game review guy with a funny accent (hi Yahtzee!),  the director of the best comedy about making porn, and our favorite Internet Meme show (do you know Trololol!?) will compete next to a bevy of Hollywood writers, directors, and actors, to receive awards for shows and films created specifically for the Internet.

The Streamys are the Oscars of the Web – a place to recognize the hard work of individuals who have forgone the big screen for Firefox, IE, Opera, and of course Boxee.

A major part of the Streamys is the Audience Choice awards so check out this year’s nominees and vote for your favorites (you can vote once a day).  Then watch the Streamy’s live on the web and from within Boxee (it’ll be the featured item) on Sunday April 11th at 5:30pm PST.

– Andrew

There’s nothing quite like sitting in a sunny stadium with a cold beer and a warm hot dog in your hand. Hearing the roar of the crowd as #2 hits it out of the park. Watching “The Wave” travel around the stadium with ever-increasing ferocity until you can’t stay seated. Enjoying the jumbotron cameraman do his best to find funny-looking kids and good-looking women.  For millions, today marks the re-convening of these time honored traditions as Major League Baseball (MLB) begins it’s 141st season.

While Boxee users have been able to watch MLB.TV games since June, we decided it was time to give the app a makeover.  We traded avant-garde stylings for a traditional baseball scoreboard look that makes it easy to see how your favorite teams are doing.  Decide how you want to watch the game in normal or “your buddies will never believe this is streaming from the Internet” HD quality (where available).  We also threw in a little special sauce to ensure that Boxee users have the option to stream the audio of blacked out games.

To enjoy the first pitch of the season on Boxee:

• download the early release version of Boxee (official version to come in the next few weeks)
  • LINUX users – we’re adding experimental support for MLB.TV on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
• sign up for MLB.TV or MLB.TV Premium
  • this gets you access to MLB.TV on Boxee + on the web
  • it also includes impressive in-game DVR functionality & multi-game view (quad view, picture-in-picture, split screen)
• put your hands over your hearts and get ready to sing the national anthem
• prepare your favorite queso dip (mine’s with pork sausage, velveeta, rotel, and cream of mushroom soup)

and… Play Ball!