Boxee alpha boasts API, Hulu-stomping browser and Pandora

Plex is awesome, it totally, totally rocks. However, if you aren't using a Mac mini or other Mac as your media center centerpiece, no dice. Boxee and XBMC's ability to run on the Apple TV (and you can actually get a skin for XBMC to make it look extremely similar to Plex, I'd say 99% identical) are what make it more interesting for me personally, at least until I decide if I'm going to get a Mac mini for the living room or not (the Apple TV is working so well, it makes it hard to spend 3x as much when I could just get 3 more Apple TVs). Now, if a future Apple TV device was powerful enough to run Plex, well, we might be having a different conversation. I still love boxee's ability to access so much online content.

I don't think it is fair to blame boxee for the Hulu stuff -- they worked together in the beginning. How do you think they were getting access to the stream initially (it wasn't RSS, it was the actual stream). Things only got really contentious after the service was shut-off, users created their own plugins for boxee and other systems (including Plex) and then Hulu did the RSS blocking. As for the future, I think we can all agree that the idea of accessing web content from the living room isn't going to go away, and that we're only at the very beginning of these types of disputes.

I don't know if there is a "turn all social stuff off" option -- but you can achieve the same thing by just removing everyone from your friends list. I like seeing what other people are watching and recommending, but I can understand that that isn't for everyone. XBMC does a lot of the same stuff as boxee (since many of the contributors and maintainers are the same people), so that's an option for Apple TV people too.

Just watched an episode of Family Guy on Hulu, no problem. It loaded a standard web page for a second, then went to full screen on the episode. This was on my imac, not atv.

Maybe the one that says Boxee alpha seeing as the updated version is called the Boxee alpha? It's in the title of the article... >.>

That's what you would think, but Boxee has been in the alpha phase of develoment since it was released. Actually, I found out it's the one that's called simply "boxee".