Living without TV?

Our family has been "off tv" for a couple of years now. Want to know about the killer desktop app that makes it all possible?

The past couple of years without television has been interesting. At first, we missed it a bit. However, we quickly discovered we had all of this extra free time. We could talk, bike ride, use our scooters, head to the park, play hide-and-go-seek, play wii, hike, walk, swim, get chores done, work on the computer, and all of this other cool and fun family stuff.

There were times however, that after getting the kids to bed (our kids are 6, 4, and 1), we'd be pretty tired and just want to chill-out. So, we lived on Netflix for that. We have the three-at-a-time plan, and it worked great.   Being a big tech fan, rather than buy a normal DVD player for our family room television though, I bought a computer with a DVD player in it. That way, we could surf the internet on our TV screen, access photos, stream our music, and so on.  Streaming internet video to the TV has worked well too.  Netflix offers play-it-now service, which enables us to stream movies and television shows right to our TV screen. Hulu (hulu.com) impresses us with all of its high quality content. Online video is everywhere, with more content providers jumping on board every day.

Then, quite suddenly, my online video world changed when I discovered boxee (boxee.tv). Boxee is a desktop application that works with mac, linux and windows. It provides a slick interface to access all of your media, music online or local and video online or local. They have a netflix channel, a hulu channel, a pandora channel, and on and on it goes, essentially centralizing all media content from all around the web. If they don't have a channel for your video provider, you can create your own rss channel to pull it in.

I've been using the Mac version for quite some time now, and its been amazing. They just launced their Windows version, and I've been waiting to write this article until the Windows launch. It is still in alpha, so be warned. However, the mac alpha has been stable, beautiful, and useful. Boxee also has a social networking component that allows you to see what your friends are watching, comment, make recommendations, etc.

If you are looking for a cool new computer project, or looking to explore the wonderful and wide world of online media, boxee is a good free app worth checking out.