At the PSFK Conference NYC, Boxee founder Avner Ronen told the audience that media companies need to embrace the changes taking place online because they can’t stop them. “Life finds a way,” Ronen told the audience, quoting Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm.
In the latest update of the media application, certain steps have been made to loop around restrictions requested by Hulu to not play their content through Boxee. In an email to users, Ronen says that his team have created a browser so that the content no longer goes through Boxee, but direct to the user from the web:
If you’ve used boxee to access Hulu in the past, with this new version you’ll notice that boxee displays the hulu.com webpage before playing the video. This is thanks to a new boxee browser based on Mozilla (like Firefox).
This new boxee browser lays the groundwork to support any video available on the web. To try out the new browser you can add RSS feeds in the App Box or go to Video > Browse > Add Source and add a URL – boxee will try to display the page and if there is a video on the page play the video.
This update also makes the Pandora music service and 100,000 radio channels available, too. We tested the system this morning on our Apple TV and, as you can see, we managed to play last night’s Jon Stewart no problem. Some shots:
What impact will this have on cable? Joining Avner Ronen on stage at PSFK Conference NYC was Scott Heifferman from Meetup who asked the audience to put their hands up if they liked New York cable provider Time Warner. No one did. A telling sign. Applications like Boxee are one more reason why it’s time to return that cable box.
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