Hasta La Gadget!

Boxee brings easy and stylish movie streaming to your iPad

Boxee is now available as an iPad app. Like the Boxee set-top box and the Boxee software for Mac, Linux and PC, the app lets you watch both streamed media from the Internet and local movies you have already. Unlike the set-top box, you can’t stream from Netflix or add other sources.

Fire it up and log in to your Boxee account, and then to your social networks. Boxee will then make playlists of any movies shared by your contacts on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. You can also add a bookmarklet to your browser and use it to save movies for watching later, kind of like an Instapaper for video.

Once my feeds start to fill up, then this social section might become useful. Otherwise I’m left with the usual junk in the “Featured” section and my own media. This is where things get interesting.

You can use the Boxee app to stream movies direct from a computer on the same Wi-Fi network. You’ll need to run a companion app on the machine, and tell it where to find your movies. The Mac version defaults to your “Movies” folder, so most people won’t have to touch the setup.

This companion app takes care of converting pretty much any format to work on the iPad. All you have to do is browse using Boxee’s slick side-to-side navigation, which works great with multi-touch.

There is no subtitle support, but Airplay works for both video and audio. And the killer part is that you can also stream your content to a Boxee box connected to your TV. If you already have a Boxee, then this free app is pretty much a must-have, just for this.

For everyone else, adding in Boxee media-streaming means yet another server app running on your computer. Then again, the social parts may prove invaluable. There’s certainly a lot in here, and the interface is as slick and intuitive as you’d like (try the pull-to-refresh gesture on the home screen, only sideways, and you’ll see the level of polish). And hey, did I mention that it’s free?

Boxee for iPad [iTunes]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote
• Boxee Beta Is a Web Video Streamer's Dream
• Boxee Beta, Now On Apple TV