Daily Debrief: The couch potato's game-changer Video

Daily Debrief: The couch potato's game-changer Video Transcript

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>> Welcome to the Daily Debrief, I'm CNET's Kara Tsuboi here with CNET News Webware.com's Associate Editor Josh Lowensohn, and we're talking about a new development on Boxee. And I think before we really get into this new development Josh we should, kind of explain what Boxee is in a sentence or two.

>> Sure. Yeah, Boxee is really interesting, it's basically a derivative of the Xbox Media Center Project and so, you know this is something people can install in their Xboxes and now it works on Linux PCs and Macs and even on the Apple TV.

>> And the whole idea is that, it really just kind of gets all of your media into one place.

>> Right.

>> It changes the way that you browse the Internet, view your photos, watch movies at home.

>> Right and it's set up to kind of let you do all that from the couch.

>> Uh-hum.

>> And so even if you have it on your laptop, you can still, you know if you have an Apple like a Mac you can use your remote to just kind of go through like radio stations and TV shows, and anything that's on the computer or on the Web.

>> With your remote control?

>> Yeah.

>> That is pretty cool. And another great part about it is it's free.

>> Yeah, totally free. It is in Private Office, you have to sign up for, you can't just download it and it doesn't work on Windows PCs yet.

>> Yet, okay. Yeah we first saw Boxee at the i-Stage event, a preview to CES. They were the chosen company, the winning company to be displayed at 2009 CES. So they obviously have a lot of buzz behind them, a lot of momentum, a lot of VC money and today or this week, new announcement that they're now able to stream Netflix, is that right?

>> Yeah, and so the big hurdle was of Silverlight, so now Netflix uses nothing, but Silverlight for streaming their Watch Instantly content. And so now with the Boxee you can just watch it on there. So, you can do that alongside YouTube videos and Hulu and CBS video and now, you know clearly anything that's in your instant queue, but the cool thing with this is that you can also browse videos, so it's like the Ruku box and Xbox 360, you can just see videos you've saved on the web...

>> I see.

>> And that's exactly what you find and search on, which is really cool.

>> So, you you've put around with the service.

>> Yeah.

>> And pretty seamless, great UI.

>> Yeah, it's a little choppy at first.

>> Okay.

>> But once it gets going, it's really smooth and super cool.

>> And so talk to me a little bit about the big picture of this development, this movement, why should we care, why does this such a big deal?

>> Well, it's kind of a center piece of the convergence of all these services there very much towards having you log in that kind of work with something with your mouse and keyboard. And this is kind of creating another way to get these services. So for example, lastfm, you know normally you have to go through a program to do it around the web and it let's you use your remote. So to do the same thing with something like Netflix and with Flickr and YouTube, I mean it's just, it's changing the way we control the Web.

>> You really believe that. This is a game changer.

>> I think it is a game changer. I mean I think anyone can do it, but these guys are doing this with just one program and adding all these stuff to one place, which is you just can't get that anywhere else.

>> Yeah and there's so many companies, you know like big names, Netflix, YouTube, you know are signing on to it, then apps, it's got momentum that's on play.

>> Definitely.

>> Very cool. Thank you so much.

>> Yeah.

>> CNET's Josh Lowensohn, I'm Kara Tsuboi, we'll see you in the next Daily Debrief. ^M00:03:14 [ Music ]