Posts from Boxee

Boxee Beta and Bookmarklet

Our portfolio company Boxee has been having a great CES. First they generated a ton of buzz with this cool TV remote with a full QWERTY keyboard.

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But that was just the warmup to the big announcement yesterday in which they released the beta version of Boxee to everyone. The beta version of Boxee is available on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux (including 64 bit). It will be available for Apple TV shortly. The beta includes a ton of new content, a more stable code base, and an entirely new UI. Here's a screen shot of the main screen which showcases the new UI.

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You can download the beta version of Boxee here.

And Boxee announced that the "Boxee Box" that is built by D-Link is powered by the Nvidia Tegra 2 (T20) processor, the first of its kind to run flash. They also announced a few more details of what is inside the Boxee Box. If you are a hardware geek, click here and see what's inside.

But as exciting as all of that is, I am most excited about a smallish announcement they made yesterday that might get lost in all of this other stuff. Boxee has a bookmarklet that you can put in any browser toolbar. Drag this link (add to boxee) to your browswer toolbar and you'll be adding videos you find around the internet to your Boxee. Right now the bookmarklet supports thirteen different video sites but Boxee will be adding more soon.

Last June, on this blog, I promoted the concept of a "watch later" service and a number of developers responded to the call with various services. Many of them included Boxee apps. But now with the Boxee bookmarklet and queue, this concept of "watch later" will be native in the Boxee service. I'm really quite excited by this.

If you are like me, you are seeing links to videos in email, twitter, facebook, blogs, etc all day long. It's time consuming to stop what you are doing to watch them. Now you can simply click on the boxee bookmarklet and watch them at home on your TV set after dinner while you are winding down from the day. It's a killer concept. Thanks Boxee.

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Open Subtitles

Over the past couple years, many of the best movies I've seen have been made outside of the US. "Foreign films" are nothing new and they have been standard fare for a long time at indie movie theaters like The Film Forum here in NYC.

But I think we are witnessing something more profound. As big swaths of the world modernize and gain large populations who have the time and the means to enjoy films, we will see more and better films come from outside of the US. We are already seeing it.

What that means is we'll need a better way to do subtitles. And we need to look no further than wikipedia and the world of open source to see the future of subtitles.

Last night, The Gotham Gal and I decided we wanted to have a quiet night at home. She made dinner and I downloaded Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). The Gotham Gal had read the book by Steig Larsson and had really enjoyed it along with The Girl Who Played With Fire. A commenter on her blog let her know they had made a film in Sweden out of the dragon tattoo book and she asked me to set it up on Boxee. So that's what I did.

The film is in swedish and the download I got did not have english subtitles. But fortunately Boxee supports Open Subtitles. If you are streaming or watching a downloaded video in Boxee, you can simply ask for subtitles and Boxee goes out and fetches them from opensubtitles.org.

You can also do this with the VLC player. When you load a file into VLC, you can check the box to load a subtitle file. You can get the subtitle file (a .srt file) from opensubtitles.org or a number of other subtitle services on the internet. Sometimes you need to play around with the delay parameter to get the syncing right, but it works well.

The larger point I am making here is that by open sourcing subtitles, we are making it easier to watch films and other forms of video that are made in other languages. People in Israel can watch TV shows and films made in the US in hebrew subtitles. People in the US can watch TV shows and films made in India in english subtitles. The possibilities go on and on. We don't need to wait for the producers of the films to release them in foreign languages (if they ever choose to do so). We can simply get the footage we want to watch and find a subtitle for it on the Internet.

The open subtitle market today is focused on popular films and TV shows, but there is no reason why it won't eventually grow to support everything from last night's Jon Stewart show to a viral video on YouTube. As the tools get easier to create .srt files and the various video players start to support them, the possibilities are endless. And the world will get just a little bit smaller as a result.

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