Continuous stream: Where Hulu Desktop rocks Boxee
This post was written before Boxee had detailed its beta, which mostly solves this issue. But I think it's still a good philosophical point about passive and active media. Sometimes applications need an autopilot mode.
Boxee has replaced TV. For me, anyway. I have a Mac Mini hooked up to a Panasonic set in my living room and a remote with six buttons to control it.
Boxee, the software, is far from perfect. The developers are smart to call it an alpha. It crashes every other day and has some annoying quirks with adjusting volume.
But unlike Apple TV/Front Row or Hulu Desktop, it gives you access to the wild west (Steve Jobs' less-than-affectionate name for the podcasting world). As you might already know, I love web shows.
Along with everything on Hulu and on my hard drive, I can get streaming channels from Revision 3, Justin.tv, YouTube, Vimeo and, yes, even porn. You won't see that in Apple's or Hulu's walled gardens.
Hulu Desktop has a slightly better interface and a few nice features over Boxee — none of them are enough to convince me to abandon Boxee's pandora's box of content (oh, you can also get Pandora on it). But philosophically, Hulu has done something really smart.
After you finish watching a video on Hulu, the next one in the playlist begins to roll. Like actual television, after one show ends, another begins (after a few minutes of commercials, of course). This is a really important behavior that encourages you to extend your TV time. Oh, well, I really just wanted to watch that one episode, you might say. But this one seems funny, too. I'll let it run.
After finishing a video in Boxee, the app seems to say: Ok, that was fun. So, what should we do now?
When I watch Fail Blog on Boxee, I want to see every video successively, not issue a directive every 20 seconds.
It's a really simple usability choice that has a really profound impact on how people interact with your product.
