FIXZR

I’ve been playing with XBMC and Boxee over the past few weeks. I’ve also been exploring Hulu, with limited success given it only really works for US residents (or IP addresses more precisely). The two can be easily combined, with Hulu (or iPlayer for that matter) simply appear as one of the services signposted by and loosely integrated into XBMC. Overall the XBMC experience is quite impressive, but a long way off passing the truly mass consumer test for ease of setup (Boxee was easier to setup but less configurable).

The key benefit of XBMC is the ability to unify my local content and online services into a single seamless UI. Hulu / iPlayer don’t know about by locally stored DVDs, nor do they pay any attention to my photo library (local or cloud based). As such they need to be ‘demoted’ to an App within a broader TV experience. But … what if iPlayer / Hulu were more like iGoogle or the BBC homepage and allowed me to plugin other Apps into their unifying UI. What if my local content could be web server enabled and appear just like every other cloud/web service (but perhaps only behind by firewall/router).

XBMC could move to web enabling my local content and match this to a browser based UI. Any TV with a remote capable of interacting with a browser would be compatible with the system, and system configuration could be controlled remotely. Now you could argue that all my content should be in the cloud, and that any system focused on merging local and web will soon be irrelevant- perhaps so (never say never) but it will be some time before performance and or price enable me to have an effective solution for the tens of Gigs of local data.

I’m aware that DLNA and other technologies can enable steaming from local storage to TVs. However there seems to be very low awareness of this, and the user experience seems to be hard to configure and underpowered at the presentation layer.