And Another Boxee Article

[xain09]

http://www.psfk.com/2009/01/boxee-a-review.html

[subvertbeats]

Interesting review - generally positive, but filled with some misinformation.

I replied with:



Hi Piers

Nice review. A few comments for clarity though:

1) You can change what is shared via your preferences at app.boxee.tv

2) MTV has far more than 49 videos - its just that when boxee requests ‘most viewed’ or ‘top rated’ from mtv, a list of 49 results is returned.
Notice that you can click on a genre ‘hip-hop’ for example, and be shown the top 49 videos in that genre.
Using the search functionality searches the thousands of videos available at MTV

3) boxee has no control over ad content - if you see an ad, its been put there by the content provider

4) boxee has no control over stream quality - generally the applications and plugins in boxee are configured to pull the highest quality stream available from the content provider, but if that quality isnt as high as you want, the content provider needs a kick, not team boxee ;)

5) Geo-restricted content is again, nothing to do with boxee - try yourself by trying to watch iPlayer on the BBC website from the US, or Netflix OD at the Netflix site from the UK. No play.
We all hope for a future without these lame content restrictions.

6) You didnt mention the fact that boxee can scan, index and resolve your local or network music and movie sources, and pull cover art and other metadata down from last.fm, imdb.com, and thetvdb.com.
This is a great solid base on which all the internet content is added

7) The hulu interface is made MUCH more usable when you have a hulu.com account. Link boxee with your hulu.com account and you get much better ways to navigate the content. Including being able to see your hulu queue, which is a constantly updating list of shows that you individually are subscribed to.

Finally, two thoughts:

Firstly, boxee is in alpha. Its at an incredible level of functionality and quality for an alpha product - only expect things to get better as it moves into beta and eventually a 1.0 release.

Secondly - boxee is FREE. Winner.

[bj2]

I am a Norwegion user of boxee

As for joost and MTV (at least), when i go to joost or mtv web site, only the content that is available to me, is listed. When I use boxee most of the movies are geo restricted. The geo restricted content do not show up on MTV / joost website.

The index must be cashed at boxee.tv? As I see this: The problem is not only that some content is geo restricted, the problem is also that the content index is prodused in US (read by a US IP adress). I guess the boxee index miss out on content that is only available in europe.

Boxee is great even with these limitations, but I wold love to be able to use joost and MTV in boxee from Norway. :)

[nalthien]

The index must be cashed at boxee.tv? As I see this: The problem is not only that some content is geo restricted, the problem is also that the content index is prodused in US (read by a US IP adress). I guess the boxee index miss out on content that is only available in europe.

Yes, I believe it is cached at app.boxee.tv. However, it does index content available only in Europe because I've had Joost tell me I can't watch items that (based on what they were) I believe were geo restricted to Europe.