Boxee Releases Public Alpha of Boxee for Windows

Over-the-top-TV specialist, Boxee, made a number of significant announcements Tuesday:

• It has now released a public alpha version of Boxee for Windows, and says that a beta version will be launched in September or October. It says that it hopes to keep the three versions of its platform--for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu--in sync as it releases updates and upgrades going forward.
• It has formed a partnership with Major League Baseball to offer the latter's subscription-based MLB.TV Premium service on its platform. The service is billed as allowing users to watch thousands of baseball games, live and on-demand, in HD where available. It also offers "DVR" functionality, allowing users to pause and rewind live games. In a posting on Boxee's corporate blog, CEO Avner Ronen wrote that "this is the first of many different live sports offerings" that Boxee hopes to bring to its users.
• It has revamped the navigation schema of its service so that it is more "streamlined." It bills the new layout--which provides users with "Applications" and "Local Media" folders--as providing a clear separation between Internet and local media "so it is clear where you can find your local media and where you can access apps like Netflix, MLB, Pandora, etc."
• It says that it has been working with Digg over the past few weeks to create a "Digg for TV" experience that allows users to see the most popular videos on the social content promotion service, as well as "what is up and coming." According to the company, a future release of the application will allow users to "digg" content directly from the Boxee interface.
• It has worked with short-form blogging service, Tumblr, to develop an application that allows Boxee users to stream music and view slideshows from the people they are following on Tumblr. It says to expect more Tumblr features on its platform soon.
• It has worked with Current TV, a cable/satellite interactive TV channel that was founded by former vice president, Al Gore, and his business partner, Joel Hyatt, and that features short-form informational programs, dubbed "pods," around 30% of which are contributed by viewers via its Web site (note: the channel also invites viewers to help determine its programming schedule by voting for video submissions on its site), to develop an app that showcases a selection of the latter's programming. The Current TV Boxee app currently offers the participatory movie review program, "The Rotten Tomatoes Show," the weekly media-focused variety show, "infoMania," the original documentary series, "Vanguard," and the half-hour animated series, "SuperNews."
• It says that Boxee users on the Ubuntu operating system who have Nvidia technology that supports VDPAU can now play HD videos (up to 1080p), using Nvidia's hardware acceleration for H.264, MPEG-2 and VC-1.
• It says that a new release of its platform has seen it make "changes to almost every piece of code we have," in order to fix various bugs. Changes made since the last public release, according to the company, include improved playback of Internet streams, VDPAU hardware acceleration on Nvidia GPU's under Linux, fixed M4A and M4V playback support, fixed low volume during video playback under Mac OSX and Apple TV, performance improvement and lower CPU usage under Mac OSX, enhanced codec support in order to improve overall playback of all media, improved DVD playback, official Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jacklope support, PulseAudio support under Linux (note: the company describes this feature as "shaky, but works"), and MP3 files indexed based on id3 tags.
• It has announced the winners of its App Dev Challenge: the Music category was won by the We Are Hunted (jury award) and DropBoxee (people's choice award) apps; the Photos category was won by the Facebook Photos app; and the Video category was won by the OpenCourseWare (jury award) and the BBC Live (people's choice award) apps. More information on the applications and their developers can be found on Boxee's blog: blog.boxee.tv.
• Finally, it says that its name now officially begins with a capital B. In a posting on its corporate blog (which was formerly all in lower-case letters), CEO Ronen wrote that "as part of our effort to make Boxee more friendly for the mainstream consumer (and frankly to stop the angry emails I keep receiving from the grammar police) we are abandoning the only corporate policy we ever had: lower case only."