Save yourself $50 to $100 a month…
How you ask?
Answer: Get rid of your cable TV.
But how will you survive without TV and Movies?
Well it might not be quite time to sever the coax cable yet, but this is the year that it will be possible and many people will start to do it. How?
Simple. It’s called Boxee.
Boxee is a multimedia application that runs on many hardware platforms including Mac OS X, Apple TV (with an easy no fuss hack), and Ubuntu Linux. It finds all your music, photos and videos on your computer (or network) and allows you to play them easily through a nice “big screen ready” interface. And if you have your computer attached to a big HDTV, well, you can watch your stuff on the big screen.
Big deal. There are many things that do that, right? Well, sure. Tivo, AppleTV, Windows Media, Vulu, and many many more. And sure enough as I type, more are being created. But what Boxee has is the right approach…open platform, network connected and versatile.
√ Stream a movie from Netflix
√ Play a video or current TV Show from Hulu.com or watch the NBC Nightly News
√ Play a current TV Show from the CBS website
√ Watch recent John Stewart or Steven Colbert shows on Comedy Central
√ Watch The WB shows
√ And Youtube, obviously
Sure there are some holes and the software is in ALPHA so it has bugs. But quality is reasonable especially considering the price…free! And compared to the network television websites where you can stream a show already (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc) with Boxee you don’t have the annoying buttons where you have to press something on the screen to finish up a commercial break (don’t the networks realize people are watching in the living room and don’t want to use a mouse every 10 minutes!). There are commercials, but they are more like what we are used to on regular network TV. And Boxee is built to be a full screen viewer as opposed to a web browser/flash plugin which sometimes fail in that category.
This is just the beginning of the end for CableTV and likely Satellite TV. Everything will be sent to you via TCP/IP. And you can do most of it right now.
My configuration is a $500 Mac Mini attached to an HDTV. But if you want to go cheap, get an refurb’d AppleTV for just $199 (or a new one for $229). Installation is as easy as it gets.
I imagine we will start to see HDTVs with this type of software built right in. Get rid of the RG-6 Coax connector and give me an ethernet jack.
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I set-up an AppleTV with Boxee. It was very simple. Download the generic AppleTV hack package and insert a USB thumb drive. It totally reformats your USB drive into some sort of dual partition Mac OS Extended format and installs the software including a boot loader, etc. Once that is done (10 mins), you insert the USB stick into the AppleTV and reboot it. After some extended booting, you restart one more time (without the USB memory stick inserted) and the boxee software is installed. You need to update the software to the latest (easy – just a few clicks of the AppleTV remote) and then it works. Sign-in with your username/pw and you have Boxee on the AppleTV.
The nice thing is that you also still have all the AppleTV functionality. Boxe is just another media choice. Basically, Boxee is like the YouTube link….except once inside Boxee you can choose network TV shows, movies, Netflix and more. This is what AppleTV should have been.
Until Apple realizes that they will never sell that many AppleTV’s as long as it is completely dependent on iTunes only, they will keep losing ground to the competitor devices out there…and/or the Mac Mini which can do anything.
For me, I think spending $200 on a refurb AppleTV and installing Boxee is a great option for any HDTV you have in your home. Maybe they will just build it into the TV in the future.