The folks at Boxee have certainly been busy. The streaming media software company celebrated a Windows release, a deal penned with Major League Baseball (complete with instant replay on games) and partnerships with Digg, Tumblr and Current TV. It was evident a year ago that this web TV company would see its share of success, but its greatest achievement is perhaps the product’s ability to rally an open-source developer community. This week Boxee announced its App Challenge winners in the video, music and photo categories. Below is a brief overview of the winning 3rd party applications.
Video Category
BBC Live (People’s Choice):
Boxee-user Ian Tweedie was disappointed with the selection of Boxee applications available to those outside of the US. While UK-users could already access BBC’s iPlayer, Tweedie created BBC Live in just 10 hours to take the title as the first developer to bring live TV to European Boxee audiences. Says Tweedie, “I’m just a normal guy living in the UK trying my best to find a job whilst using my free time to learn and tryout fun new things… The dev challenge seemed the perfect excuse to dive in, because if TV isn’t electronic heaven, I don’t know what is.”
OpenCourseWare (Judges’ Choice): Roshan Revankar created Boxee’s OpenCourseWare App to deliver MIT, Stanford and Berkeley open course video lectures to eager home learners. The app takes advantage of the plethora of course materials from universities with open license educational resources. As OCW has already been heralded as a great stride in the need for accessible education, it’s not surprising that Revankar’s Boxee app took the Judges’ Choice Award for video.
Music Category
Drop.io (People’s Choice):
and the Drop.io web applet
are both well-known fixtures in the streaming music space. For this reason, Jon Steinberg saw a natural fit between the streaming music collaboration capabilities of Drop.io and the ease of Boxee. He hired developer Nick Perez to build DropBoxee and the duo won audience choice for an application that lets users share streaming music downloads in batches.
We are Hunted (Judges’ Choice): Nick Dima built the We Are Hunted Boxee app as a way to bring the most popular songs from the web to Boxee audiences. Whereas HypeMachine streams music aggregated from top music blogs, We Are Hunted pulls from blogs as well as from Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and forums. Dima’s We Are Hunted app won accolades as a great tool for music discovery.
Photo Category
Facebook Photos (People’s and Judges’ Choice):
UC Berkeley grad student Junda Liu scooped both the audience and judge’s choice for his Facebook Photos application. Says Liu, “I actually started the coding on Saturday afternoon and the app was almost done by Sunday night. Then on Monday, the Memorial Day, I polished the UI, took screen shots and wrote a brief readme.” The application allows users to view Facebook photos and albums as slide shows. Liu plans on further developing the application and asks that users test the app and
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All of the above applications are available in Boxee’s App Box. To download Boxee sign up on the home page and follow the instructions to install it.
