Mediastreamers: Why they aren’t dead
Last night one of my favorite hosts finally made his triumphant return on the silver screen, Conan O’Brien, on the newly revitalized Tonight Show, but unfortunately I missed it. I don’t have a TiVo and I didn’t want to wait hours to download Conan’s first episode, I just wanted to watch it. So I turned to the source that I knew would have it, Hulu. For those who don’t know Hulu is, it is a collaboration between all the big TV studios, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS (it first started out with just Fox and NBC) offering the latest episodes, for free, on-demand viewing. The only requirements is that you have a capable browser, Adobe flash player installed, and a fast enough connection to stream the sub-SD/ED quality video. But I had a dilemma, instead of watching it on 24″ LCD monitor, I wanted to watch it on my 42″ Panasonic plasma HDTV that was situated right in my living room. I had a few options, either I bring out all the necessary cables and wires to hook up my computer to my TV and disabling the use of my computer for the ~45 minutes or I could use something boxee that I installed on my Apple TV, which was already hooked up to my TV, to stream the content direct from Hulu itself. The choice was obvious, I fired up my Apple TV, navigated to the Hulu feeds application in boxee and I was ready to watch the plethora of video made available through Hulu. I was ready to watch Conan completely disconnected from my computer. There are plenty of other uses for my Apple TV with boxee. I can seamlessly stream media within my personal network, connect to Last.FM, pandora, watch or listen my favoritepodcasts or any number of add-on applications that others had created to watch content from Discovery, Youtube, Joost, Vimeo, or the Onion… the list goes on and on.
*Image cred to Lifehacker
If there’s so much free content, why aren’t more people using boxee? Well, a few reasons, installing boxee on the Apple TV isn’t the most seamless and easiest thing to do and if you’re expecting to get HD content streamed to your Apple TV, don’t be. The Apple TV is simply not powerful enough, it can barely handle 480p streams (video can be choppy at times), but that’s a limitation on how Adobe Flash works.
The Apple TV never makes use of the GPU because of its proprietary nature, reverse engineering the thing would be one heck of a trial. However, that’s all going to change with the recent announcement that Adobe is working hard with other companies, such as Nvidia and Broadcom, to develop a way for it to offload some of the video decoding to the GPU, resulting in a less choppy, HD video playback.
Another thing holding boxee back is that fact that the bandwidth speeds in the US required for these streams is simply not there, you can blame that on those ISPs implementing speed caps and metering. Video steams would be hit with much buffering to the point where it would keep you waiting for minutes at a time, which is not very seamless.
Let’s, also, not forget that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 has media streaming/extending capabilities as well. Those two devices double as gaming consoles and media devices and features are constantly getting added. Just this Monday, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 is to have advanced Netflix queue integration, taking the computer part out of the equation and letting you browse Netflix’s watch instantly movie catalog, as well as, last.fm integration. It’s a pretty big deal, where in the past, you’d have to go to a computer, log into your Netflix account, find stuff you want to watch and then add it to your queue. This cuts having a computer out, giving you access to browse straight from the 360.
However, with the popularity and interest of all the individuals in the development of boxee, which can be installed on just about any platform (right now you can get it for the Apple TV, Mac OS X, and Linux and a Windows build is coming as early as the end of June). With the recent release of a developer API, it has limitless potential. If you have the know how and the drive to build an application, the tools are these for you to use to build your own application, kudos to the openness that is boxee. What’s most exciting is the operating system-agnostic behavior of boxee, it doesn’t have to be confined to a particular set of hardware, since it was originally a fork of the the very popular XMBC, which gave whomever had an original Xbox the ability to turn it into a multimedia powerhouse. Boxee is making the experience of watching on-demand content as easy as turning on your TV. For those proclaiming the death of mediastreamers, you couldn’t be more wrong, they aren’t dead but just taking a different form. I did eventually end up watching Conan using boxee and it was almost as seamless as watching it on TV.
--written by Peter To--
