Boxee Beta Available to the General Public

On the 7th of December 2009, at a special event at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in New York City, the first Beta version of Boxee was unveiled to the public. The cross-platform, open-source media center with social networking features was unveiled to the public as a Beta, but it was not released to the public as a Beta. Only a select group of users were given access to Boxee Beta and its features.

Speaking of features, here are some Boxee Beta highlights:
- A brand new user interface (UI)
- Navigation has been improved
- Boxee Beta will allow users to search for TV shows and movies on the internet and on the local network (LAN)
- User controlled Queue
- Shortcuts (for movies, programs, apps, so on).

As of yesterday, the 7 of January 2010, Boxee Beta became available to the general public. The announcement was made by Boxee CEO, Avner Ronen: "The Beta is available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu (including 64bit). The version is still not available for Apple TV, yet, but we are working with the atv-creator community, and look forward to having news on this front. In the past 4 weeks since we announced the upcoming Beta we had the help of tens of thousands of early access users who tested the Beta on all different platforms and gave us great feedback. Hundreds of bugs have been opened and we’ve been working diligently to resolve as many of them as we could.”

According to Ronen, the team behind Boxee will keep working on the software throughout the year. If all goes according to plan, Boxee v 1.0 will be released at CES 2011. Meanwhile, grab the Boxee Beta here.