Funny Or Die picks me up when I’m tired.  It comforts me when I’m sad.  It shelters me in a storm. It does all these things (aside from the shelter thing, I made that up although I could print out it’s pages to line the Boxee RV) with hilarious videos from professionals and amateurs alike.  Whether it’s movies they’ve created exclusively for the site with stars like Will Ferrell, Rachel Bilson, and James Franco, stand up comedy from Zach Galifianakis, Demetri Martin, or Mitch Hedburg, or user generated content you’ll find something to make you laugh.

The Funny or Die App gives you an easy way to find exactly what you want on Boxee by filtering content by Featured, Most Viewed, Red Carpet Club (Celeb videos), and Search.  Once you’ve watched a video, you’ll be able to rate the video Funny (yes it should continue to inspire LOLz in others) or Die (this, like 2 girls 1 cup, should never be seen again).  As always if you find a video you like, you can select share to send it to other Boxee members and out to your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr feeds.  Here’s a look at what’s in store for you in the “Featured section”

Install the app, because the H… is O.

Some of the Boxee team will be down in Austin, TX for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival from March 10-17. The five of us are staying in a glistening 31-foot motorhome that we planned to leave at an RV Park close to the conference downtown. But, hell, it turns out the RV Park closed since we made our reservation, so now out of luck and looking for a driveway to park our beautiful beast.

Can you help us out? We’ll be real quiet (only if you want us to be) and we’re open-minded to barter for rent. In return, we ask for 31 feet of pavement and a couple of trees to hang a hammock. It would real cool of you if you let us host a kegger in your front yard.

If you’d like to offer us a spot, please email me at zach+rv@boxee.tv.

Thank you!!!

Yep. You can now, once more, pwn your AppleTV following these super simple instructions, and get the Boxee Beta on that shiny Apple box. In fact, if you already have Boxee Alpha installed, you should be able to just update Launcher and then update Boxee to achieve the same result

Kudos to JimWiley and hillbilly1980 from the Boxee forum for making the original update script, and Amet, davilla and stephan.diederich from Team XBMC and atvusb-creator for fixing the Launcher, SoftwareMenu and the Creator itself, permitting this goodness.

Enjoy, and let these guys know you appreciate their efforts by commenting below and/or here.

** Installing Boxee on your AppleTV simply adds a Boxee option to the main AppleTV menu.  Previous AppleTV functionality remains in tact.

As David McIntosh, the founder of Redux, will tell you, there’s 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Within the heaping pile of user-generated content, probably lies a tiny nugget of golden, undigested, raw goodness.  Do I want to dig through hours of video and photos to find it? No.  That is the Internet’s job.  This is where Redux comes in.

Redux lets people create channels of content around certain subjects like Internet memes, favorite shows, music, celebrities, and art… Once a channel is created, other users can submit content into it.  A few popular channels from Redux: 110% Awesomeness, Best Music Videos Ever, Art, WTF?, Fail Moments, Top Gear videos.  All submissions are timelined, and can be played back to back as a playlist.  Users can also give props to their favorite content as well as comment on it, which bumps the item to the top of the timeline.

On the web, Redux.com has a full-screen “TV Mode” that endlessly plays crowd-sourced videos from a specific channel.  Don’t like one video, hit the arrow key, and skip to the next.  It’s great for killing some time and catching up on the latest memes – whether you’re in a specific channel, or just watching all items as they’re submitted in real-time.

They’ve brought TV mode to Boxee and created a great app.  Anyone can run the app and start watching channels while Redux users can login to their accounts to get a more personalized experience.  The controls are a bit different than you’re probably accustomed to as there’s no Boxee on screen display, and hitting ESC or back will actually switch between full screen and menu mode.  To get out of the app you can select “Exit Redux”.   Let us know what you think!

Favorite use case so far: Getting all of the PSAs to play back to back from the GI Joe PSA’s channel. Porkchop Sandwiches anyone?

Mark and I had a little back-and-forth in March of 2009.  A year has passed, some stuff has changed, a lot has stayed the same.  We decided it could be interesting to debate the issues in front of a live audience.  SXSW was a perfect choice. It is on Mark’s home turf of Texas, but the attendees are Internet people.

We will debate the viability of the Internet as a source for consuming video entertainment vs. offerings from Cable, Sat and IPTV operators. We have an opposing point of view on almost every issue.

I would like to officially claim the position of underdog in this debate. Here is why:

• He is Mark Cuban.
• He owns the Dallas Mavericks. I get excited when I get bleacher seats for a Knicks game.
• He was on Dancing with the Stars. I can’t even get slow dancing right.

Though if things get physical I think I can take him out. He didn’t show real skills in his fight with Sheamus (see below), and I was a programmer in the Israeli Defense Force.  I feel pretty confident about this one.

If you are attending SXSW this year then I hope you’ll be able to attend the debate. Not sure whether it will be broadcast online, but we’ll share the link here if it is.

Since releasing the Beta we have seen significant uptake in usage. Some stats:

• 150,000 new users joined Boxee
• 3 million Boxee apps launched
• 1.5 million TV episodes and Movies were watched

The new version of the Beta includes almost no new features, but rather is focused on bug fixes. We focused on stability issues. Many hangs and crashes were identified and resolved. We spent a bunch of time trying to improve the never-ending saga of handling SMB shares.

All-in-all, more than 500 issues have been resolved.

We could not have done it without the amazing feedback users are giving us. With the Boxee Beta, we have expanded our Early Access list to tens of thousands of users.  This Early Access list has developed into a very active community of testers reporting bugs in great detail on http://jira.boxee.tv.

The community has helped us focus on the most important issues and identified points where Boxee needs some TLC.

Here are some of the things that kept us busy:

• Multilingual keyboard support: under settings->appearance->region to add keyboards
• Significantly improved video quality of our DXVA support
• Regained support for older graphics cards (pre-2.0 pixel shader) which was broken after move to DXVA
• Improved file scanning performance
• Hardware acceleration of H.264 on Intel HD4500 cards
• Hang on FLAC tag read over SMB
• SMB crashes when canceling SMB operations
• Hang on shutdown due to wait for SMB and file scanner
• Hang in file scanner when manually scanning a folder
• Hangs due to excessive locks around database pool
• Hangs when left idle due to UDP sockets leak
• Corrupted graphics on some ATI cards (X1600)
• Log file cycling (every 32M, old log overrides boxee.old.log)
• Present action dialog when clicking on DVD icon to allow browse/eject
• Optimization to file scanning making it less IO intensive
• Fixes to iPhone remote keyboard under Linux
• Added support for m4b playback (audio books)
• Crash in ID3 tag reading (playback and background scanning of some mp3 files)
• Crash in some wav files which contained extra-info in the wav header (playback and background scanning)
• Crash on some rss feeds caused by mis-parsing of empty http headers
• Crash on image extraction from mp3 tags (in some cases)
• win32: fixed runtime error in some cases where vc90 runtime was not installed properly
• Dual screen issues. sometimes a movie would only show black screen when switching screens.
• Allow apps to define properties for rtmp streaming
• Playback of some internet video streams, mainly coming from playlists (partial read of the network buffer was causing wrong codec detection)
• Playlist playback of internet video streams was sometimes using the music player instead of the video player
• Playback of music from history (was not working and now it will open the folder played from)
• Logout was broken enabling logging-in even after password change (was using stored cookie)
• Win32: when launching boxee while another instance is running it will just bring the other instance to front

Download the new version from http://www.boxee.tv/download and help us continue to improve!

One thing that remains not addressed is AppleTV support for our Beta. Unfortunately, as AppleTV support was not created by us, we have no control or insight when, if ever, it will be fixed. That said.. For the adventurous, JimWiley & hillbilly1980 have worked on a step-by-step guide for getting your AppleTV running Boxee Beta. Let them know how you like it

During the hearing the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, Rep. Rick Boucher, asked Zucker “What about Boxee?”.  Here’s the clip with the transcript below:

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): What about Boxee? Mr. Zucker you probably are in a better position to answer that. Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?

Zucker (NBC): This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): “Well would you have negotiations with Boxee upon request?”

Zucker (NBC): “We have always said that we’re open to negotiations.”

I’d like to set the record straight regarding Boxee’s access to Hulu. Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.

Above, Mr. Zucker says the original decision was made by Hulu’s management. That is correct, but as Jason Kilar (Hulu’s CEO) wrote in his post, the request came from NBC. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.”

There are now close to a million people using Boxee. When they watch shows from Hulu they are watching the ads and generate real revenues to NBC. We hope we will be able to work with NBC and offer more content and value to Boxee users as we believe a good number of our users will also be willing to pay one-time or subscription fees to access NBC’s content.

Mr. Zucker says they always said they are open to negotiations. That has not been our experience, but at this point, we will take Mr. Zucker’s offer at face value and will contact him. We are eager to work with both Comcast and NBCU to bring more content on more devices to our users. We believe the Internet represents a great opportunity for content owners and we hope that current artificial barriers put on distribution over the Internet will be taken down.

This is why we plan to release a Payment Platform this summer where users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”.

As content owners benefit, so will Boxee. While details are still to-be-determined, Boxee will charge a small fee (i.e. lower than the 30% charged by many app stores) for transactions which we enable. This beginning to the Boxee business model ties our success as a business to the success of our partners.

This is a direct result of the generational shift towards over the top video during the past few years. Recent college grads will tell you the Internet is vital to them in a way PayTV could never be. Their social, professional, and family lives are reinforced by (and sometimes wholly self-contained within) the social networks, blogs, and interaction the Internet provides. This generation has turned to the Internet for their entertainment needs as well.

The move towards the Internet as a main source of entertainment does not mean everything will be free however. The iTunes store has already shown us that people are willing to pay for content when it’s affordable and easy to access. Our goal is to equip the content providers that we’ve spoken with over the past year, both big and small, with a way to monetize their content above and beyond the advertising-only model.

It’s our belief that the Internet is ready to become the 4th method of distribution for broadcast & premium content after Cable, Satellite, and IPTV (FiOS, u-Verse, etc.). In the case of Satellite and IPTV, it took an act of congress to open up these delivery methods. This time it’s people who are demanding this change.

The Internet represents a great opportunity for the major media companies and for the independent content producers to create more engaging and immersive experiences around their content and for them to be paid for more eyeballs on yet another screen. The connected living room represents a new medium, one in which great value could be generated. There are also many business models that will thrive including Ad-supported, pay-per-view, subscription and authentication (e.g. TV Everywhere).

We hope we can play a key role in enabling these content owners to showcase and monetize their offerings while creating the best experience possible for users.

If you are a content owner and interested to be one of our first launch partners please email content@boxee.tv to start a conversation.

First and foremost. a big thank you to all of our users who have carried us this far, especially those who have been vocal about what they love about Boxee and what we could do better. We continue to rely on your feedback to improve Boxee and bring connected devices into the living room that are driven by your needs.

Secondly, it’s been great working with D-Link and Nvidia on our first hardware device, the Boxee Box. Now that it’s been announced, we can’t wait to bring it to market in the 2nd quarter of this year.  Meanwhile our BD team is hard at work ensuring Boxee will arrive on TVs, game consoles, and other living room devices soon.

As a quick recap, here’s some of the awards and articles we garnered over the course of the show…

Awards:

LAPTOP’s Best of CES 2010: Best Home Entertainment – Boxee Box by D-Link
Winner Last Gadget Standing
Best of CES: Popular Science Products of the Future
CEA Best of Innovations: Home Theater Accessories
G4 Best of the Best at CES
Dave Graveline’s Top 10 @ CES
CNet Best in Show Finalist: Home Theater

Articles:

BBC – dot.Rory: CES 2010: Last Gadget Standing
CNN – Boxee Box crowned ‘Last Gadget Standing’ at CES
NBC Washington – Boxee Box Just Made Couch Potatoes’ Lives Even Easier
Wired.com Gadget Lab – Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote
Engadget – Hands-on with the Boxee Box
Scobleizer: Part I — Hot Startups to Watch in 2010
TechCrunch – Boxee Beta Now Available To The Masses
Lifehacker – First Look at the Boxee Beta – Boxee beta
Gizmodo – Beta Now Available for Public Download, Box Has Tegra 2 Chip
Mashable – Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed
Ubergizmo’s Best of CES
…more from Google

Videos:

Here I am presenting Boxee at Last Gadget Standing.   The intro video was streamed from Adult Swim’s site for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job (a recommendation if you ever enjoyed Mr. Show with Bob & David).

And here’s Avner running through a demo of Boxee’s Beta software at the D-Link booth.

Photos:

We had a pretty busy booth… lots of people came over to get demos and hear more about Boxee and the Boxee Box by D-Link.

(to see 3 photos from the show and 36 other photos of us partying… go here)

We couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2010.  Thanks for all the support and we look forward to bringing you much more in the months to come!

*Special thanks to Boxee users @BobSuicide, @JaylinSuicide, and @iMelody who worked our booth with an air of professionalism, intelligence, and passion we could not have paid for.

The T20 is based around a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU with that additional graphic umphhh NVIDIA is famous for, allowing us to deliver our user experience in a small box, and very low power consumption (we’re green too )

With Tegra 2 powering the Boxee Box you can:

• Enjoy a fluid and responsive user interface that is similar to the UI performance up till now available only on full blown PCs
• Play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD video content from the Internet
• Play Adobe® Flash® 10.1 content from across the web, including HD content

More inside the Box:

• RF chip by Nordic – to support a great remote control experience that is not dependent on line-of-sight and can work from anywhere in the house
• 802.11N wireless chip by Broadcom

What’s not in the Box:

• No hard-drive – We discussed hard-drive at length with D-Link, and figured people already have storage solutions, and that we should do our best to reduce the price of the Boxee Box. You’ll be able to connect your choice of storage devices directly to the Box using USB
• No IR – While we realize many people are using universal remotes, we believe there is a greater benefit having a full QWERTY keyboard, and the right way to do that was RF. We really wanted to also support IR, for various reasons we could not get it as part of the build. We continue supporting this in software, so you can use any IR dongle and continue using your universal remote with Boxee.