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Alright check this out. So I'm standing here with Andrew from Boxee and
I got to tell you Andrew, I have no idea what this is. - Well let me tell you.
- Which is probably why I'm standing here. But I was told that it's interesting so I'm going
to trust them. - Well who did you hear that from?
- People. People around the show. They're talking. - They are talking. - They're talking about Boxee.
- We've just G4 in best in show and we're the Ice stage winner for the CEA. They've dubbed
us America's next top gadget. - Wow. - So those are some big shoes to fill. High heels.
- Well alright. So tell me what's going on with... With Boxee.
- So Boxee is a social media center. The idea is to bring all of your entertainment into one place.
It doesn't matter if your drive on your NAS, or out in the cloud on sites like Hulu,
Netflix, CBS.com, flicker, last.fm, Pandora. All those great services you enjoy
through a web browser, we try and put it into one interface, that you can navigate with a remote
from your couch. - Now is this, is this software based, or
is it hardware based? - So it's a totally free download software,
we run on Mac, Linux and Windows, we also run the AppleTV and the end goal is kind of
to get Boxee on any device that's connected to your TV. Whether it's your PlayStation 3,
your Set-Top Box, your Media Center PC, whatever it is, we want it to run Boxee.
- So show me how it works. How does this go down?
- So, this is the main interface box. You see we break it down into video, music and pictures,
and this is some of the local media on my hard drive. And Boxee automatically goes out,
and fetches this information. Pulls in all of the DVD covers, screen shots,
if we want to find out more about Spiderman 2, we can get all that information.
- And this information is not coming from like tags on the file, it's pulling these down off of..
Where is it coming from? - We use a service called Muse.
So they provide all of our metadata for the media.
So if I go into music, we're all about the connected experience.
We're all about connecting you with sources on the web. So, let's say I want to watch
lets see... We'll do Amy Winehouse. - She's delightful.
- She is delightful. - A delightful woman. - Whenever she's out of rehab, yeah.
- I'm always happy to see people that have their lives so together.
- So, as you see here, we have the option to play the CD that we have on our local hard drive.
- Right. - We can make a station for her on last.fm and listen to artists like her,
or stuff that we don't have from her. We can also go to MTV Music...
- Out of curiosity, I don't mean to trip you up here, but if you listen through last.fm,
is it going to track all your listening through last.fm, when you
listen to it? - Yeah. - Like it's going to track it just like you would through the site?
- Yup, we use their API and fully integrate all that. - Very cool.
- So we're looking at a video from MTV Music, so we wanted to play the CD,
we hop straight to MTV music and now we're going to watch the video.
- So this is coming off of the web. This isn't storing it on your PC so you bases...
Like Amy Winehouse so now it's going to bring you all of this Amy Winehouse stored.
- Exactly. - Very cool. - So this is kind of, if you're into music, we've got that.
If you're into TV, movies all that kind of stuff.. - Now what's the social angle on this?
What's... You say it's like a social service. Like.. How is it social?
- So, we really feel like there's so much content out there, it's hard to navigate it all.
So what we've done is we integrated a social layer, so that you can share information about
what you're watching with friends, and no matter where it's coming from, whether you're watching
a DVD, a stream, something you downloaded off BitTorrent, we're going to try and drive
your friends, to legal sources of that content.
- Now I'm noticing that Computer TV is not listed here on one of these tiles,
and I'm thoroughly offended. - Well, we can work on that.
- Ok. Good, alright. Alright. Excellent. Ok so this all looks very very impressive,
you said it's completely free right now? - Completely free, open source, we're trying to be
the Firefox of the media center space. - Ok. - So, customizable, extendable, free.
One of the things I wanted to show you real quick, we build... We build custom applications for the,
for the content providers, so if you click on Hulu, we take you to an interface that looks
just like the Hulu website. - This looks... This.. Ok, now you just blew my mind because this is
what I've been wanting. This interface for Hulu. I've been wanting to find something,
where I can lay in bed, browse through Hulu and not have to deal with the web interface.
And that looks really good. I'm telling you some of our production crew back at the
back at the office, they live Hulu. Like they've stopped watching regular TV,
and this is a beautiful interface for Hulu. - We see that more and more, people are
kind of canceling their subscription services, and just watching stuff on the web,
and I can pull up stuff, really quickly, you know maybe 10, 15 seconds of navigating with the remote
and you're into the content from Hulu. - That's incredible.
- And same thing applies with the social layers so you can recommend the latest show at the office.
- You'd be like "Hey".. So you'd automatically like twitter out to all your friends,
"This was an awesome episode, watch it"? - Exactly.
- And they click on it and go watch it? - Yup. But we integrate with all the social
networking sites, anything that has an API, we can exchange information with.
- Very cool. - One other thing, Netflix, I haven't got it paired with my account,
which was a big 'no-no' for the demo.. - That's Netflix's fault.
- But, we have the most extensive... Yeah, we have the most extensive implementation
of Netflix available, so you can actually browse the entire instant watch cue.
- Wow. - Cue stuff up, and play it right through Boxee.
- So my instant watch cue that I've set up, to say 'Watching my Xbox,
I can then pull it up through Boxee and get the exact same cue? Right there, listen.
- Exactly. And you know how you have to go to your computer and cue stuff up,
and then watch them on the Xbox? - Yeah. - You don't have to do that with this.
- You can actually browse.. - You can browse and pick stuff and play immediately.
- That's really cool man. I can see why you guys.. What was the award?
- G4 Best in Show, Icestage winner from CEA, and hopefully many more to come.
- It looks like you probably will. It's a beautiful interface. It really is.
Clearly you guys have put some work into this. - Thank you. - Thanks for showing it off,
I appreciate it Andrew. Thank you.
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