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.
subscribe to blog
join boxee
boxee on twitter
Welcome.
We're very happy to have you
FYI, there is a small but disgruntled population just north of the USA that would love to use Boxee to it's fullest also.
disgruntled? I thought you were peace-loving. You'll be happy to know that we're working with Canadian content providers as well.
Good to hear.
GlobalTV has just released their HD quality video and Rogers On Demand Online was just launched.
There must be some solutions there.
Wonderful news folks from Boxee! Boxee announces plans and release date in USA…when was that? Boxee lands in Israel! Boxee now working on Great Britain! All still 'coming soon'! Boxee, the 'shot heard around the world'! Yes…I still have hopes that you will actually have (1) to sell…but, alas, I still believe in Santa!
As Andrew states in latest,(above press release) "we promise a announce date soon"…does that sound familiar to anyone?!
Yep, I'm in Germany… would love to see more content on Boxee here too.
/sign
It would be great if they could get an app for Sky's player…
Britain…nice… but what about opening premium (and regional) broadcast channels from the US of A and Britain towards the rest of the world? Netfilx, ABC etc., not available for European viewers, IPlayer not available for the rest of Europe / World. Abandon the virtual borders and embrace a world wide audience! I guess a lot of ppl wouldn't mind paying for premium (high quality) content.
would love to see this as well, and it's a message we tell content providers, but ultimately it's going to take some time for this to happen.
I would suggest meeting with the guys from seesaw.com as they have already connected to BBC iPlayer, 4OD and Five on demand. It’s kind of the UK version of Hulu. Only ITV player left, and hoping that will come soon. Might save you some time. A Seesaw app would be perfect. Sky Player is another one to look at.
However you should also take a look at a major new IPTV platform for the UK called BBC Canvas which has recently got approval. The project is quite some away from delivery, if its even started! Everyone is moaning that no one else will be able to compete. once it goes live.
This is great news. Boxee provides a wonderful GUI, but can be frustrating for us UK users in terms of finding good content. So thanks for thinking of us!
Can we expect not only iplayer but itv catch up, 4 on demand, live bbc channels and live itv/ channel 4? I hope so!
we hope so too!
Nice, thats good news for everyone not stateside.
PS. Someone please refresh my memory…will the Boxee Box be able to play/stream 1080P content? If so, will the bitrate matter or not? For instance would it be able to play something of 5mbps? 10mbps? higher?
Thanks
1080p… all the way.
Wow. Now its USA, britain and not the rest of the world. In Europe there are so many different copyright rules and protecting orgs, each country has to add stuff independently. Eg: in the Netherlands, our interactive tv has no BBC interactive content… Would be great if BBC, HBO, etc, etc content would be available to us. But can team Boxee change the drm world? I think not….
Bringing stuff like the iplayer to the tv show library (like hulu comedy central etc etc are at the moment) would be extremely nice – since its features like this that make boxee so brilliant having seemingly 'all tv shows' at your fingertips. Yet the people in the UK have to manually open up the iplayer app, which is quite tiresome.
Also spotify is quite big in europe as well, something like how the 'Tv show library' and tv show search but for music would be amazing, or using grooveshark or any of the other music streaming services would be an amazing addition to boxee – not just for the european community but to everybody
The music ability in boxee could be much improved, and would i think bring a lot more widespread acceptance of boxee – since people at the moment will go 'well flicking through channels is good enough for me!' but if you can say 'what if you want any song you feel like, while in your living room' would i think appeal to massive amounts of people and make boxee seem much more appealing
Or perhaps make an API available so developers can implement these types of features? Aka adding a layer on-top of search (Which users can enable/disable of course) so searching will give results from your app as well as the normal search functions
With DRM being a big issue (for German UK expats accessing iPlayer and many other siuations), how about a VPN app with boxee either levergaing existing VPN providers? or ,better, locating their own international gateways and providing a Paid VPN service , which is reliable and not designed to be a rip-off?
would love to interview you in our fibre studio here in nottingham. get in touch and let's make it happen!
It would be nice if more global services would get an app e.g. Grooveshark (the guys at Moovida [prev. Elisa Media Center] did it) or an One Manga app (available in Enna Media Center from the makers of geexbox).
Hey Andrew
Still no news of the boxee box?
.
[...] to London in the next few days to snag a heap of premier UK applications and content. According to this post today, they want to see BBC iPlayer on Boxee, and so do we! This week Idan descends on the [...]