Boxee – Social Media Television for the Masses

Boxee, the ‘Social Media Center’, was finally released as a Windows public alpha recently. Epiphany were lucky enough to get an early invite, but now that it’s available to the masses, we thought we’d take some time to give everyone a little ‘heads up’ and introduce this truly fascinating (and possibly revolutionary) little bit of software. Welcome to Boxee, the Social Media Center, coming to a TV near you soon.

So what exactly is Boxee?

“Boxee is a free, open-source software platform that integrates personal media with Internet media along with social networking…Boxee’s free software lets you navigate all your personal movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites”

From Boxee.tv.

Imagine using your normal TV set to access:

• all of your own local media (MP3s, TV shows, films)
• all of your favourite Web 2.0 websites (Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr)
• all of your favourite online Video streams (BBC iPlayer, CNN, Hulu)

all at the touch of a button on your remote control, and completely for free.

Add into that the ability to ‘follow’ other Boxee users, recommend content to your friends, rate the media you’ve just watched, and you’ve got Boxee, the Social Media Center.

However, this list doesn’t really do justice to the wealth of features Boxee offers – let’s dig a little deeper to understand just how fantastic this software really is.

Boxee Internet Media

There is already a wealth of content streaming services and Web 2.0 sites available directly from the interface in Boxee, as well as the ability to add your own media feeds, and this is growing by the day. Here’s just a taster of what’s currently available:

Video and Television: The BBC iPlayer, The Open University, BBC Live, CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Joost, Netflix, The Warner Brothers Network, Revision3, MySpace Video, Digg Video, MTV Music, CNET,  Apple.com.

Audio and Radio: Last.fm, BBC, Jamendo, National Public Radio, Pandora, SHOUTCast, We are Hunted.

Photos & Pictures: Flickr, PIcasaWeb, Facebook Photos.

As well as the many services already mentioned you can also add your own feeds to Boxee; video, pictures, audio (podcasts) and even good old text feeds can all be easily added and subsequently accessed from within Boxee.

The Open Platform

Boxee makes extensive use of python and XUL (the same XML platform Firefox uses) and has recently opened up a public API.

Put simply, this means you can expect the services and software available on Boxee to continue growing exponentially, as amateur and professional developers alike have the tools to easily create new stuff; The Open University in the UK and Major League Baseball in America are two very recent additions to the Boxee platform.

Regional access restrictions

As a UK user you may find attempting to access many of these services a little frustrating at the moment due to regional access rights, but don’t despair, it’s only a matter of time before these US services open themselves up to international markets. Just be content with the fact that you’ve got BBC iPlayer and they haven’t .

The Social Aspects of Boxee

Boxee usage requires you have a registered user account, which means that a social network of fellow Boxee users is added too with every new user that signs up. Once registered Boxee will then auto generate an activity feed of the media you’ve just consumed. You can then find, invite and follow as many friends as you want via the Boxee website.

Once you’ve decide to follow someone, their Boxee activity feed shows up as part of your friends feed, accessible from within the Boxee interface. Does this sound familiar to anyone (tweet tweet)? You can also rate and recommend any content that you consume, and easily view recommendations made by your friends. If that media is available online you can watch it instantly, right there and then.  If it’s not available Boxee will try and find an appropriate trailer to show you.

Boxee will also spit out your activity feed into your Twitter account (or Tumblr), so you can tell the whole world what you’re viewing as you watch it! The more adventurous amongst you can then pull these feeds into your other social media accounts, such as Facebook.

The Boxee Media Center

Another great feature of Boxee is the Media Library.  Once you’ve pointed the software at the location of your files it will automatically scan them and pull down a plefora of information about the files from the internet, including movie & TV reviews and ratings from IMDB, and screenshots, wallpaper and fan art from the TheTVDB; all viewable via the Boxee interface. Once Boxee has this info you can then browse through all your content by genre, title, year, actors, director, title etc.

Will Boxee play X or Y?

Out of the box Boxee will play 99% of all the media types (both audio and video) that you throw at it. Boxee has been based on the open source software XBMC; a stable and long lasting platform that has many thousands of developer hours put into it. The only other media player I’ve used that has ever come close to the level of support for different file types that XMBC does is the infamously good VLC. XBMC/Boxee will even play video files that are incomplete; I’d like to see Microsoft Media Player do that! Boxee supported file types from Wikipedia

The Boxee Box

Currently, if you wanted to use Boxee, you’d have to watch your media on your PC or hook up your laptop or computer to your TV and set up a remote. The other alternative is shoe horn it onto an Apple TV. Not too much of a challenge for the technically inclined, but a big barrier to entry for the rest of the population.

Eventually, Boxee intend to release their own hardware, as well as licence the platform out to as many different platforms they can (think satellite receives, consoles etc) so Boxee will be available in a neat little box to put under your TV in the not so distant future.

Is Boxee the future of social media/television/the internet?

Social Media

People love to think that everyone else is interested in their taste of music, films, and TV shows, and love to tell people about it. Right now, there is no better way to share this information with the world, and make specific recommendations to friends. Spotify has already shown how people love to share their music playlists, Last.FM has demonstrated how people like to make and receive recommendations. For me, it’s an absolute no brainer that technologically inclined users (and many others besides that) will love sharing what TV shows they watched last night, especially if it can be seamlessly slipped into their current social media platform of choice. Boxee isn’t going to change social media wholesale but it’s certainly going to add an important extra dimension to it.

Boxee is also lauded for how it centralises all of your favourite websites and web services into one place that can be easily navigated around – a significant feature that could change how people digest social media, if not social media itself.

Television

If it’s not Boxee, it will be something very similar. Television is changing, be it in the delivery method (on demand & internet streams, as opposed to static over the air broadcasts) or the consumption method (more social/active, or at least the option of activity, rather than passive); television is merging into internet television. Boxee is meeting both these emerging market demands, and in abundance. Boxee is placing itself as a prime candidate to become the internet television and Social TV platform of choice.

The Internet

Clearly Boxee isn’t going to take over the internet but how the internet is being used is certainly transforming and will continue to change over the coming years. For video, at first we had YouTube (and numerous imitators), then we’ve dedicated TV streaming services such as hulu.com (in the US) and the BBC iPlayer here in the UK. Whilst most geeks will happily watch TV shows on a PC, getting your mum to sit in front of the computer and watch a movie is a challenge. And this is how Boxee, and many similar offerings will change the internet. How we view and access web based content is going to change – from the desk chair to the sofa.

Internet Television as a future marketing channel

If you’ve got this far into this article you may have wondered what exactly has all this got to do with digital marketing?! Well ‘internet television’ will become another marketing channel which businesses are going to have to consider as part of an all encompassing digital marketing strategy. We’re not talking about ads in TV shows here (necessarily) but rather, developing applications that let users access your companies’ online content via their chosen method, their TV set!

If I were a company with a wide variety of videos on my current web site, I would, right now, be asking my developers to create an application for the Boxee platform. Sure it’s not going to get huge amounts of eyeballs, but it will mostly certainly gain your company a hell of a lot of kudos and generate buzz around your brand. Remember that the people who adopt social media networks first are the webs big boys, they are the linkerati, the movers and shakers of the web, wow them today and gain the incoming links for your SEO campaign tomorrow; whilst future proofing yourself in an upcoming marketing channel.

Sound interesting? Sign up and download Boxee here. Once signed up don’t forget to follow me, David Wilding, username tinfish.