What could be cooler than surfing the Web and watching your big-screen TV at the same instance? Getting rid of your cable box, perhaps. The folks who brought you the free Boxee software that transfers streaming video, music and other media from a computer to a TV announced upgraded features that week and debuted the first piece of hardware: A little black box (of course).

While the ability to use Boxee for free on your PC or Mac will continue, the hardware, built by D-Link, will allow Wi-Fi capability and output HDMI and analog stereo audio. You can even connect to an external drive, antenna or webcam via two USB ports. There’s additionally a remote control, although many users may still prefer an iPhone.

Boxee features a 10-foot interface, meaning its display is large sufficient to be read from that distance. The sleek black Boxee Box, stylish but lopsided like it’s melting into the table, was unveiled at a

hip nightclub in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Monday night.

New Apps

Wired magazine’s Epicenter blog, which covered the event, said developers showcased new applications for Boxee: Clicker, which provides an index of online TV shows and allows searches; The Escapist, a video-game review service; Qurious, which provides knowledge about whatever is on screen and allows users to order songs and products; Trendlines, which recommends clips; and Suicide Girls, which provides adult-oriented videos and photos.

Boxee was developed by Avner Ronen, previously a top executive at Comverse, a leading provider of software and services to telecoms. In founding Boxee he set up a direct challenge to cable providers.

“The challenge for the cable industry is how do they grapple with the fact that that is in some way a substitution for the things they do?” he told The New York Times in January.

Battle For Content

Access to the movie and…

Original post by dhiram