If you’re looking for live football games in HD from the Internet here in the US, you don’t have many options.  If you’re a player who’s not one of the 1700 picked to play in the NFL each year, you also don’t have many options.  Enter the United Football League (UFL) and a group of owners, players, and founders that are dedicated to providing quality football at affordable prices (average ticket price is $20) for underserved football fans.

Starting with a league of 5 teams – the Florida Tuskers, Hartford Colonials, Las Vegas Locomotives, Omaha Nighthawks, and the Sacramento Mountain Lions – the UFL has quickly gained a following of hundreds of thousands of fans across the nation.  The rules are similar to the NFL with a few exceptions that are meant to give fans greater access to traditionally off-limit locations, including the locker room and behind the bench, to better engage the fans and bring them closer to the action – you won’t see any gimmicks or stunts in the game, just awesome bone-crushing football.

With the brand new UFL App on Boxee (it’s called the United Football League in the app library), you’ll be able to see almost every league game streaming live in HD at the same time as they air on Versus and HDNet (we’re catching up to you Mark!).   You’ll get the same in-depth access to behind the scenes conversations, along with a full schedule of games, league footage, and access to previous games on-demand.

The first game streamed on Boxee will be a rematch of last year’s UFL Championship Game when the Las Vegas Locos host the Florida Tuskers at 11 pm ET on Saturday night.   Try the app and sign-up for game day reminders via email to make sure you don’t miss it.

We have a bunch of Boxee Box news today!

Pre-order now!

D-Link has signed up Amazon (US only) as exclusive pre-order partners for the Boxee Box. People who pre-order through Amazon in the US will receive their Boxee Box before it goes on sale anywhere else.

We think the Boxee Box is ideal for people who want to:

• Play what you normally watch on your computer  (whether it is on the Internet or your home network) on their TV
• Tailor the Internet experience to a huge flat screen
• Do it in full HD, 1080p with 5.1 surround whenever possible
• Share the stuff you watch with your friends and see what they are watching
• Use a simple remote rather than a keyboard and mouse

If that is what you are looking to do on your TV then you will love the Boxee Box. It’s $199 and it’s available for pre-order now

UPDATE: you can now pre-order the Boxee Box in Canada through BestBuy.

International launch:

We have some good news for people who live in _______ (see list below)! D-Link has decided to go for an International launch rather than just release in the US.

Come this November the Boxee Box will be available in the following countries: the US, Canada, Australia and in Europe – Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

As soon as we have news regarding other countries we will let you know.

Intel Inside:

The Boxee Box has moved to a completely new platform, and is now based on the Intel Atom Processor (the Intel CE4100 system-on-a-chip codenamed “Sodaville”).  This switch means that Boxee will be part of the Smart TV program that Intel is pushing and that will be heavily promoted this fall.

At CES we demoed a Boxee Box running on Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform. We decided to make the switch to Intel earlier this year (which was a part of what delayed us from our earlier ‘Q2 launch date) to provide better support for high-profile h264, HD playback. There is plenty for us to do with Nvidia on the mobile front and future generations of Tegra are being designed to support a wide variety of video formats, so we are excited to be continuing our relationship in other ways.

The Boxee Box with Intel Inside supports full HD. 1080p, High Profile 4.1. And while the spec calls for 62.5Mbit/s, we have actually tested it in excess of 90Mbit/s (sorry, that’s the highest bitrate sample we could get our hands on). No sweat.

We’re at the Intel Developer Forum today showing off the new Boxee Box by D-Link so if you’re in the area, stop by and see us.

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.