I think Boxee is the best media center application available that delivers a wide range of internet video, music, photos to your big screen along with a great user experience. If you have a Mac then download the app and give it a try.
Since Boxee launched their public alpha they have been approached by a number of developers and 3rd party content providers that wanted to be part of the Boxee experience.
Unlike other closed media centers, Boxee is open. It’s open source which means that developers can muck with the code, modify and customize. That’s how the AppleTV port of Boxee happened. All of that development came from a 3rd party developer.
But Avner and the team at Boxee wanted to make it easier for users, developers and content providers to build stuff on top of Boxee.
This morning Boxee announced the Boxee App Box. Avner describes it on their blog post this morning:
this is a first take at an application “store” that makes it easy for users to install new apps and plugins. there is also native support for 3rd party repositories, so you don’t have to rely on boxee as a gatekeeper for what goes into the official boxee app store. for example, you can add dir.boxeehq.com as a repository to get access to all the boxeehq.com apps.
This is something that we have been talking about doing at Boxee but honestly I thought it was going to take them much longer to get this version out the door. I was delighted when Avner showed this to me last week.
(disclosure: my company, Spark Capital, is an investor in the company along with Union Square Ventures and I’m on their board of directors.)