MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

Boxee launches BBC iPlayer, Joost, MTV Music support

Thursday, January 08, 2009 - 12:08 PM EDT

Boxee's private alpha went well beyond the developers' expectations with over 200,000 people signed up. Now Boxees has announced that they are opening their alpha to all Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV users. Windows is also moving into private-alpha (which means you still need to get invited, but we're going to release thousands of invites every week as they scale).

Boxee plays media from your computer and other devices in your home network, as well as connect you to various Internet sources that allow you to stream or download movies, tv shows, music and photos.

New applications in this release:

• BBC iPlayer (UK users only) - we could not ignore the calls from our London-based users for proper iPlayer support. it is a huge success in the UK (bigger than Hulu in the US), and it provides access to a huge selection of tv shows and radio in great quality. too bad it is only accessible from the UK.. BBC-if you want worldwide viewers, we're here with open arms!

• Joost - in the survey of video applications you wanted to see on boxee, Joost was #1 (iPlayer was #2..). Joost has a great content library with TV shows, web videos, music videos and movies. now you can play all of Joost's media, browse different channels and search through the entire Joost library.

• MTV Music - when MTV Music launched a couple months ago it got great reviews from users. it is a prefect service for the TV. we started by letting users play music videos from artists they come across on boxee. now you can go into the MTV app and conduct searches by Artist/Song or just browse.

New for keyboard users:

 + TAB - lets you switch to other Mac apps (even when boxee is in full screen)
 + F - toggles between Window mode and Full screen.
shift + letter - jump to the place in the list that starts with that letter (e.g. shift+h will save you a bunch of clicks to get to Heroes on Hulu)

Bug fixes & enhancements:

• dual screen support
• Netflix streaming improvements
• Search in Hulu
• ffwd, rewind, pause in Comedy Central
• improved mouse support
• 3 digits episode numbers recognized
• giving folder.jpg its proper priority
• updates to SMB library
• updates to video and audio playback libraries
• updates to Flash player

Boxee has also created developer.boxee.tv, which provides basic guidelines for developers who want to build apps to run on boxee.

More info here.