Boxee is now in public alpha for Mac, Ubuntu, and Apple TV (that means available for everyone!), and in private alpha for Windows. If you remember before, the private alpha isn't a deal-breaker; request a download and you'll usually receive one in a week or two. Besides wider availability, Boxee has also added support for Joost and BBC iPlayer, though the latter will only work in the U.K. They've also expanded the use of MTV Music, adding search and browse options. [New York Times]

It's kind of crashy, could use a better navigation UI and takes too long for movie streams to get going (and then when they do it's kind of finicky) but we definitely appreciate being to stream The Fifth Element over Wi-Fi in decent quality, when it actually gets going. More than anything though, it just makes us soak our pillow with even more drool dreaming of a Hulu app. [iTunes via NewTeeVee]

A lot like YouTube but even more like Hulu, users can create clips from programming and share it with others through the site. Users can also subscribe to the feeds of other users, allowing for convenient, mindless sharing of media.

In addition, 60 official content partners (aka networks) will be joining in on the fun as well with somewhat vague "premium" on-demand content.

Beyond streaming one's television through their browser, none of these features sounds independently revolutionary. But together, the services look to combine internet and TV in a new way. [TechCrunch]

No, you don't have deja vu: Two companies you never heard of launched similar-sounding interactive TV boxes within a few hours of each other. But this one is quite different: It doesn't mess with antennae or try to get in bed with cable or DSL providers. It's just a nice tidy box that sends all the world's content to all TVs in your house—without set-top boxes in each room. There are some catches, of course.

The first catch is that the box-and-remote combo costs $500. Sure, you only need one kit for the whole house (unless you want additional remotes, but every TV would get the same experience anyhow, so there's no point). But $500 is pretty steep.

Another catch is that the content itself is a little up in the air. Yes, there are plenty of services that let you buy or rent movies on a PC, and many more coming along that give you piecemeal content for free. But everyone does it differently, and you will have to become master of many interfaces with that one remote.

The launcher app, called Zviewer (what else?), is useful to aggregate all the different programs you'll want supplying you with video, and it also lists all of the BitTorrent and other video on your hard drive, not to mention photos and music. But there's no way to bring all web video into one seamless interface, and though ZeeVee will try to do just that, they admit that the beginnings will be a tad humbler.

I do like this concept. As soon as you connect your VGA out to the ZvBox and connect that to the coax network in your house, it scopes out the channels occupied by your cable box, and picks one that's not. Any TV with an ATSC tuner will see the ZeeVee stream as a high-def channel, and display it as such via the coax input most cable and satellite customers have generally forgotten about. You put the ATSC tuner to use, your coax cable gets new life, and you get an easy way to toggle from your other cable content to your PC's video bidness.

At this point, it's still a work in progress. Though the company promises a June ship date, the hardware shots are just renderings. The software, barely in beta, will only run on Windows XP and Vista, though ZeeVee assures us a Mac version will be out this year. I am a little leery of trying to use PC apps while sitting at my couch, so hopefully the software itself will handle most of my needs.

Promotional screenshots shown below depict some pretty nice media management, but the company admits that these are more aspirational, and will not represent the initial user experience:
If you think about it, the PC is kind of arbitrary here. I asked Brian Mahoney, ZeeVee director of marketing, if the company couldn't all the same turn this into a whole-house extender for my TiVo HD, or maybe a video iPod, and he said, "We can indeed take the video inputs from any device. That is a path we're looking at in the future."

My question for you, dear Giz readers, is this: Remote and PC software aside, how easy is it to build the box ZeeVee is talking about? And is it worth $200 to $250? Maybe it is. If you're really eager, it's going on pre-order at Amazon today, with plans to ship in June. If I were you, I'd wait until your friends at Gizmodo at least saw the thing in person before shelling out five bills. [ZeeVee]

The Contenders:
Hulu: NBC Universal/News Corp.'s mutant is a sandbox-y YouTube for their properties. Joost: Streaming P2P service from Kazaa/Skype founders that wants oh so badly to be real TV. It's got deals with Viacom and other name players—News Corp.'s rumored to be at the table as well. Miro: Open-source Cory Doctorow-anointed Joost-slayer. You download, rather than stream. It uses RSS-based channels and BitTorrent for its P2P workings.How They Look (and Feel):
Joost's translucent black interface wins hands down in the Slickness Dept., and its channel grid layout is the standout of the three. One issue is that player controls disappear when you're going through channels or shows, so you can't mute or pause a video playing in the background while surfing. But in terms of intuitiveness, on Joost, it's naturally apparent how to click around then start watching shows. (The "oh no, we can't play this now" error message assailed me more than a couple of times, showing there are still some P2P kinks to work out.)
Miro is more powerful for tweakers and creators, which contributes to it being less straightforward. It's not immediately obvious how you start watching stuff. Since its channels are RSS-based, you have to subscribe to them first, and then pick episodes to download. I should add, the best (though perhaps non-legal) content might require you to hunt outside Miro's interface for a torrent. Miro's the least flashy, using a modified browser scheme that takes longer to zoom through than Joost or Hulu, which is a problem when it overwhelmingly features the most content.
Hulu's good for a browser-based streaming player, as I've said, with a clean, mostly easy-to-navigate system.

In the end, no one's really nailed the content organization bit. None of them are bad, but they don't make surfing for new stuff particularly intuitive or fun. It can be a chore, and sometimes it feels like a long one.

Ads, I mean uh, "Revenue Model":
Miro is blissfully ad-free, but the other two are not. Joost's bumper ads are quick and not overly annoying. The ones that occasionally interrupt shows without rhyme or reason, however, are too long and randomly timed. They'll drive your head into your monitor. Hulu's gotten worse since its debut week, where I saw a single 30-second clip per 40-minute show. Watching Heroes the other night, I got slammed with an ad at each of the dots in the timeline.

The Meat:
Joost has 356 total "channels," though some aren't channels in the traditional sense. There's stuff from MTV, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, CBS, Warner Music, as well as channels of CSI, Happy Tree Friends, Transformers and GI Joe. There's offbeat stuff, too, like the Really Terrible Film channel. Used within legal boundaries, Miro lacks solid mainstream content. Comedy Central's "channels" are stand-up clips and web shows only, and Adult Swim just contains their video podcasts. But Miro boasts 2,756 channels, with everything from "Ask a Ninja" and National Geographic to NASA and Wired Science. But yes, you can start your own channel—all it takes is a torrent and a dream.

Hulu's the slimmest, but it has the most recent episodes of the best shows: House, Battlestar Galactica and any other popular shows from NBC Universal and News Corp., like SNL, The Office or Family Guy. There's no indie or offbeat content whatsoever—it's a totally corporate venture.

Across the board, scattershot content is still a major issue. Joost has a Comedy Central channel but no South Park or Chapelle's Show. Miro's kind of defined by being whatever from whoever. Hulu's trimmer offerings at least have an internal logic, with the newest five or six episodes of current shows available, and full seasons of past shows like Buffy.

What You Now Know:
No matter what service you pick, you won't find everything you want, thanks in part to corporate hang-ups and in part to the primitiveness of these early stages. They're maddeningly incomplete, like a crappy library in a rural town. Joost is probably your best bet in terms of quantity and quality, with Miro working better if you want a ton of new programming but don't care about corporate quality. And if you want Battlestar, well, the choice will be made for you. [Joost, Miro, Hulu, Flickr]

When pressed about the high cost of sporting rights, content strategy and acquisition EVP Yvette Alberdingkthijm told paidContent:

"I don't have to play in that league. I do know that, within my own universe of free online viewing, I can do live really, really well, and I'll be starting with that in the US in Q1 next year."

On a fast 7Mbps broadband connection, Joost was running well this morning. Its interface is easy to learn, and the video plays back full screen and streams smoothly. The quality leaves something to be desired, though—it's not even at the level of standard definition, and certainly not high definition. There's also not quite enough content on hand, with offerings from a couple of big names such as CBS and CNN, but mostly second- and third-tier content sources.

Even though this beta 1.0 is still a bit rough around the edges, we could still see the tremendous potential of this format. It actually feels like television, but everything is streaming. If this network and others like it are completely built out to where they can actually stream near-HD quality video, we might be seeing people abandoning cable for it. But not yet. [Joost, via Ars Technica]

As I said, it's a hybrid peer-to-peer network, built to deliver instant playback of any of any of the 5,000 movies in its planned library. The first few seconds of each movie will already be stored on your box, so that you get a satisfying instant-play feeling even as its caching the download. A central server should mean satisfactory playback from the beginning, when there aren't many boxes deployed. The same system should also guarantee Vudu won't have the same high-demand p2p choke-up that Joost suffered recently. (Congestion-wise, it also helps Vudu that this is a pay-for-play service.)

Since Vudu makes every box and knows their exact capabilities, as well as all of the content coming and going, the "load-sharing" distribution will be easier to manage than a Joost-type PC based service. Vudu stores the most popular movies throughout the network using a predictive system to speed up delivery. On your home network, any background data sharing will have a low priority over the other internet activities, but when you kick on the Vudu and demand content, it takes your router's center stage.

The actual product announcement, including movie availability details, will happen later this summer, though we are told it will definitely ship this year, and for a price somewhere under $500. You will be able to buy or rent movies: 99 cents to $3.99 per rental; $4.99 to $19.99 per purchased movie, which will reside on the Vudu box and nowhere else. Vudu promises to let you download a purchased movie again, in the event of a hard-drive failure or some other catastrophe.

It's a very cool application of the technology, though coolness doesn't guarantee success, especially in the set-top box world. (See TiVo, then see Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD.) To check out the user interface, click through the gallery to see how you drill down through genre, select a movie, then watch the trailer or get actor and director info. (My apologies if the shots are out of order—that's actually 100% Flickr, but I will say sorry anyhow.)

Exclusive Pics of the Vudu - Video Store In A Box [Gizmodo]

Or at least that's what CEO Michelangelo Volpi is suggesting with his yadda-yadda about Joost being "just a piece of software that can be installed everywhere." He also said to the New York Times that they want NBC, Fox and Disney on board "because we are an attractive place given the numbers of users we have."

I don't know about what impressive number users they have now, but if they want to move out of the PC and into the real world, my guess it that NBC, Fox and Disney—who are already in the living room—are not that impressed. Or looking from the other side, if they are an attractive place to be in, why do they want to move into other spaces?

We will see what happens in the future, if they can get their way out: first they will need to convince hardware manufacturers that all the other guys are wrong and they are right. Given the current video craze, I wish them good luck with that. – Jesus Diaz

Joost everywhere, embedded in hardware [The Register]

With Mediaroom, Microsoft's interface brings together lots of existing technologies into one set-top box offered to customers of IPTV services such as AT&T's U-Verse, letting users instantly access TV shows, Internet video, and practically any multimedia content that's now available on the Internet, on cable TV or broadcast. This will allow service providers to compete against the burgeoning Internet TV offerings such as Joost, as well as cable TV providers.

Of course, there's TiVo-like digital video recording. Also, you can get shows when you want them with video on demand, and now Microsoft folds in personal media sharing similar to what's already on the Xbox 360 and Windows Media Center, letting you grab music and photos from other PCs in your house and watch them on your TV.

The platform will also let you completely annoy everyone else watching TV with you by letting you punch up multiple screens, channels, programs and camera angles on one screen. Never mind that the show you're watching already has one director—you can be a second director, and you can completely ruin everyone's viewing experience but your own.

And oh yeah, also added to the mix is DTT support, meaning digital terrestrial television, where you can also receive regular old broadcast TV channels. So there it is, come full circle: This ought to put a fire under the asses of cable TV providers. There's Internet TV, multimedia access around the home and outside, too, and you can watch the Super Bowl, too.

It's going to be a brave new world. In fact, IPTV is seen by many analysts as the successor to cable TV; right now IPTV subscribers number just 3 million, but that number is expected to jump to 50 million by 2010. – Charlie White

Press Release [Microsoft via Daily Tech]

The end of physical formats for movie and TV shows could be called digital convergence, a happy, wonderfully singular, unified digital world. Content moves seamlessly from your multifunction portable device to your TV, between your computers, and to every monitor and audio system and random networked appliance in between. To have that happen in a stream of bits floating effortlessly on radio waves, without physical discs or specially designated boxes, would be truly wonderful.

But an end to physical video formats doesn't mean an end to format wars. In fact, once film and television content are no longer bound by physical media, we're in for the mother of all format wars.

Don't be quick to leap over Blu-ray and HD DVD as the final hurtles before the end of the race; we're far worse off without those discs. After they are gone, there won't be just two, or three formats even. We're talking 10 or 20 disc-free formats at the minimum, all with their own subscriptions, fee rates, movie selections, file resolutions and formats, use restrictions, preferred content providers and sometimes even hardware. Without discs, we may very well be screwed.

Here are some of the players already making their way onto the field:

Amazon Unbox. Xbox 360 Marketplace. Amazon Unbox on TiVo. Wal-Mart. San Disk USB TV. Apple iTunes. Sony Internet Video Link. BitTorrent. Netflix. Slingbox. Vudu. Joost.

All have incomplete catalogs. All are restricted in where, how, and on what you can play their content. None play together well, if at all. iTunes content plays on an iPod, on Apple TV, and on your computer, but not on your Creative Zen. Your Wal-Mart wares won't play on your iPod. Good luck getting it on your plasma TV easily, or to another computer in your house. God forbid each service offers its own set-top box, like Apple TV and Amazon Unbox's TiVo setup. Can you imagine them all stacked up next to your TV?

We've got a name for this all-singing, all-dancing, all-digital melee: the N-format war, N being an unknown number of formats between 2 and infinity—since anyone and everyone can enter the game, and pretty much anyone and everyone is.

Convergence is the consumer's dream: one system that supports all. But companies are mostly thinking about their own "ecosystems"—vertically integrated offerings like Apple's iTunes, iPod, and Apple TV. Within these ecosystems, there is limited convergence: It's fairly easy to move stuff around within the Apple ecosystem, and it's not too difficult to move content around the Vista Media Center/Xbox 360/Zune ecosystem either. As time goes by, these ecosystems will only add new options, such as Windows Home Server, and hopefully build smoother systems for juggling media.

Microsoft and Apple obviously have advantages in the N-format war that the others don't, because they control entire platforms of hardware and software, and for the most part all levels of digital content playback, movement and distribution.

Apple, which develops both hardware and software, always starts with the premise that the customer will only buy Apple-branded products. Microsoft, having its origin as a software maker that supplies billion-dollar hardware partners, has traditionally focused more on developing "standards" that others will adopt.

On the one hand, this might be a good defense: Amazon, Wal-Mart and BitTorrent's stores license WMV and its accompanying DRM scheme. It's likely that Microsoft is offering its tech for rock-bottom prices to encourage adoption. And the upcoming IPTV capabilities of the Xbox 360 are just an extension of its larger IPTV platform licensing. AT&T and a growing number of other IPTV providers around the world already use Microsoft's IPTV platform.

On the front end, every decent version of Windows Vista comes stacked with Windows Media Center, which streams to the Xbox 360, itself already a VOD box—and will become even more so once the IPTV rollout begins.

On the other hand, Microsoft has lately been following Apple's lead, and spending a lot of time working on its own hardware, and not all of it plays well with Microsoft partners. At the same time, some of its DRM arrangements, particularly in audio, have atrophied for lack of support in times of crisis. (Can you say "PlaysForSure"?)

For the time being, neither Microsoft's nor Apple's ecosystems play nice with each other. They can be coerced into sharing the playground with smaller ecosystems like TiVo, but usually only with a third-party workaround, and even then they tend to be messy. They are neither integrated nor seamless. Think of, for instance, Apple TV over Slingbox or Netgear's Digital Entertainer HD.

The one thing every service has in common, the Tootsie roll at the center of the Tootsie pop if you will, is a computer. With a computer, you can run multiple applications. It might be a giant pain to launch one program to see your favorite TV show, then launch another to catch a newly released film, but it's plausible.
The trouble is, we don't like to watch movies at our computers, and computers have failed to colonize the living room.

On the Windows side, we've seen countless iterations of the Media Center PC, many very good-looking component-styled PCs, complete with HDMI and optical audio outputs. But those don't sell. The gigantic sales figures of Windows XP MCE were most often chalked up to the fact that the software came free with most PCs; people didn't even know they had a so-called "media center."

The Mac mini seemed like a primo candidate to lead the computer's charge to the TV. Small, attractive, not a speed demon, but solid enough to serve as a media center for recording shows and serving up media to and fro. Instead of pushing it for that purpose, Apple brings us Apple TV. For some reason the current state of the industry favors set-top boxes to full-fledged thinking machines. We rent them from the cable company. We buy them from game console makers or Internet movie distributors.

So we're stuck with half-assed solutions—be they Apple TV, Sony Internet Video Link, Netgear Digital Entertainer HD or Xbox 360, all under the control of format owners hell-bent on keeping out any format that might make a competitor rich. Add to that the content delivery of cable, satellite and IPTV boxes, already featuring their own set of content-access rules and regulations.

It would seem that the solution would be to choose a single distributor. But licensing on the content side makes this impossible. Frightened by iTunes' hegemony and concerned with a shrinking physical-media market, Hollywood is not licensing full catalogs to Apple, or anyone else, be it Netflix or Wal-Mart, because digital distribution puts an unprecedented amount of control into the hands of the distributors themselves. So every distributor gets a chunk of the content pie, but no distributor gets to offer the whole thing. We have 20 distributors, 20 formats.

So you're forced to subscribe to two, three, maybe even five of those. How will you know, after spending $300 on a set-top box, whether your particular movie of choice on a Friday night will even be on it? The studios one day must all appear in the same box, better still, all together in multiple competing boxes from Microsoft, Apple and Wal-Mart. That way, the differentiating factors become the user experience and the price.

Currently there is no magical box that will deliver everything. You'll definitely need a hardcore PC or Mac Pro to handle new video content, not to mention multiple client applications and some ingenious and possibly unlawful way of getting the stuff to your TV. Your best efforts will produce one jerry-rigged system handling 20 disparate services and formats, and content providers will view you as the crook, and the openness of the PC as a threat. Dedicated boxes, maddeningly piled up by your plasma, will continue to be the preferred distribution for those worried about content "security".

Welcome to the N-format war. The online distribution landscape is messy, uncoordinated and fragmented, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. It almost makes us nostalgic for the days of Blu-Ray and HD DVD yore that are yet to come. – Matt Buchanan

Oh, and pass the "I'm a human" challenge/response test, which most of you should get past. We hope. – Matt Buchanan

Invite Form [Joost via GigaOM]

The shaky manifesto wavers a bit into believability, however, when he says that the current geek-heaviness owes to "the average consumer still being confused about different video formats and DRM rights, getting downloaded video onto the TV, and premium content being slow to arrive to the digital market." On that much, he's right.

But is that enough to reason to think paid downloads are doomed to imminent oblivion in the wake of say, Joost? Or a subscription service attached to your 360 or Apple TV? As Ars points out, people occasionally do like to own the content they watch. You know, sometimes. And the market's still in its relative infancy, with potentially lots of room to grow into the proper niches to fit users' tastes.

Have guys paid for a video download? From who? – Matt Buchanan

Forrester: Paid video downloads, Apple TV a "dead end" [Ars Technica]
Image via Flickr

Free Invites! [Joost]

The service has been hit hard by the thousands upon thousands of new users who have joined up in the past week, and some have been unable to access the programming. Even though it's a peer-to-peer system, there are still servers that people need to be routed through, and apparently there just aren't enough of them out there. When asked about the performance issues, CEO Fredrik de Wahl said "It's stumbling a bit, whereas we'd like it to be sprinting."

It's cool, bro. You're still in beta. But while you're adding more servers do you want to go ahead and add some decent content while you're at it? Thanks. –Adam Frucci

Informitiv [via Broadband Reports]

The dudes who brought you KaZaA and Skype also announced new content for the "TV anywhere" service, including Hasbro, the NHL, Sports Illustrated (that's the one with the ladies rolling in sand, right?), Sony Pictures Television, CNN and our favorite, Adult Swim. (Carl is so dreamy!)

Lest you think all of these video treasures come at no cost to you, Joost said that they had enrolled 32 "blue chip" sponsors, including megabrands Coca-Cola, HP, Intel and Nike.

I'm told that sponsors will buy ad time on given shows, so that a certain show (for example Aqua Teen Hunger Force) will feature ads from a certain sponsor (say Coke). The ads will take the form of quick promos at the beginning, and also may appear as live links in the corner of the screen during the show itself. Some ads start today; a full range of sponsors will be appearing by the end of the month.

Of course for now, none of this matters unless you have a good friend on the inside. – Wilson Rothman

Product Page [Joost]

In fact, pirated copies of movies and TV shows are often available in HD, in their original 16x9 format. Not so with a TV show or movie from iTunes: its sides are chopped off in 4x3, and it's not available in HD. Doesn't this remind you of the days of Napster, when there was no other way to legally download music? Legal video downloading is having a hard time keeping up. That's what the writer of the-ish.com/blog noticed as he compared one against the other:

Sounds to me like legality, and even the convenience of auto-downloads, are having a hard time competing with pirating. But what it really comes down to for me is this: If i get LESS INFORMATION from my legal purchase, if i cant even get widescreen (much less HD) then why should i be purchasing instead of pirating?

iTunes versus Pirating (Digg mirror) [the-ish.com/blog, via Digg]

The Wall Street Journal says a licensing deal between Viacom Inc. and Joost is in the offing, where thousands of hours of Viacom content will be licensed, including programming from Viacom cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, and movies from Viacom's Paramount as well. This sets the stage for a battle royale between Internet titans, all fighting for nothing short of world domination of the next generation of home entertainment.

Niklas Zennstrm and Janus Friis, the two founders of Joost, also started up two peer-to-peer networks: file-sharing service Kazaa and slam-dunk Internet phone company Skype, and have done well for themselves. Awash in $2.69 billion in cash from their sale of Skype to eBay, the two are having no trouble financing their new Joost venture, which originally was called the Venice Project. Joost can now flourish even further with this new shot in the arm, adding Viacom to the Warner Music Corp. already on board. – Charlie White

Viacom to license content to Joost [Reuters]

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Product Page [Joost]