JoostTeam

boxee’s private alpha went well beyond expectations. over 200,000 people signed up.. today boxee is 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 boxee is going to release thousands of invites every week). bear with them as they scale…)

new applications in this release:

• BBC iPlayer (UK users only) – boxee could not ignore the calls from 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, boxee is waiting here with open arms!

• Joost – in the survey of video applications people 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. you can browse the 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 perfect service for the TV. they 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.

bug fixes & enhancements in this latest release:

• 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 also created developer.boxee.tv, which provides basic guidelines for developers who want to build apps to run on boxee. this will continue to grow over the next few months based on users requests. an early example of using the boxee API is work done by Orange Labs (from the France Telecom group) who created a boxee application for their photo sharing service Pikeo.