Boxee, which is still in private beta testing, is a media center solution that allows you to play back content from third-party providers like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, or Last.fm through a very slick interface.

Open-Source on the Apple TV

Most of the hype around Boxee right now is due to the fact that it can be installed on an Apple TV, which greatly extends the functionality of these devices.

As Boxee is an open-source program, developers can easily extend the functionality of the application and develop plugins for it. Boxee's back-end is based on the open-source xbmc media center project.

The Firefox of Media Centers

Fred Wilson calls Boxee the "Firefox of the media center software sector," and judging from what we have seen of it so far, we would have to agree.

According to Boxee's announcement, the company will use the additional funding to extend its user base and to extend the feature set of the software. Hopefully, this additional funding will also mean that we can soon see hardware with pre-installed versions of Boxee.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo

AMP runs on Adobe's cross browser Adobe Integrate Runtime (AIR), which saw its 1.0 release in February. AMP is available immediately as a free download for Windows and Mac from the official site.

"It's a merger of TV Guide and DVR for Internet video content," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release.

Because Flash has native support for high res video, AMP can display videos in 1080p, 720p or 480i. Indeed, the video in the Adobe Media Player looked very nice, even when streaming. Adobe doesn't host any content, but merely facilitates the delivery from CDN to user. AMP pulls content from partners via RSS feeds -- and users can add any video RSS feed into the player.

Right now, AMP will only display content by default of partners who have a relationship with Adobe. Interested content creators can email Adobe to get their content into AMP. Anyone, however, can seed content externally via an RSS feed. Adobe pulls channel branding directly from RSS feeds as well, so even content providers who have no relationship with Adobe can create branded channels in AMP -- the downside is those channels will only be available to users who add them via an external RSS link, and not in the application's global catalog.

According to Adobe Media Player Product Manager Ashley Still, at some point in the next year or so, Adobe plans to go the user generated content route and make it easier for people to add content directly into AMP's catalog. For now, though, that requires a relationship with Adobe's biz dev team.

Only content providers who have a relationship with Adobe will also be able to utilize Adobe's adserving technology to sell ads on a rev share basis on their videos in the media player. AMP supports pre, post, and mid roll ads, as well as overlay ads and the ability to serve advertising to downloaded videos offline. Offline ads on older downloaded content can be dynamically updated anytime the user connects to the web.

Adobe is also announcing the launch of Adobe TV. Adobe TV is a web site and AMP channel dedicated to aggregating Adobe's array of video blogs and tutorials. These videos had previously been scattered all across the Adobe web universe, on numerous blogs and web sites. Adobe TV brings them under a single umbrella and makes it easier for Adobe fans and users to find those videos or subscribe to them in the new media player software.

Conclusion

Adobe sees the release of AMP as a piece of their "ecosystem for the creation and delivery of next-generation broadcast entertainment." We see it as a showcase for Flash video -- which is getting competition from Microsoft's Silverlight -- and AIR. There is no better way to show off your developers tools than to demonstrate something cool that was made with them.

It is also another piece in Adobe's growing online empire. In October, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that within the next ten years Adobe applications would all be completely in the cloud. That's an ambitious goal, but Adobe recognizes that web apps are the future. The full power of Illustrator or Premiere operating in the cloud might be more then 10 years away, but by using their web application stack (Flash, Flex, AIR, etc.) to push out less complex consumer apps, Adobe is betting that it can get the mainstream used to the idea of web applications and get developers hooked on Adobe tools in the process. That's a smart play.

Each of these applications, however, is really just a proof-of-concept for the "Web Media Player Framework" that Yanez is trying to create. According to Yanez, the way videos are displayed now is broken. Requiring users to navigate from page to page on multiple sites isn't as intuitive as what we're used to from television. Instead, users should be able to browse multiple videos from multiple sources from within a single player.

Writing about Hulu, Yanez says, "a video player that is capable of multi video plays is necessary for Hulu because the main complaint against embedding individual videos is that it causes the page to have endless scrolling. I believe Hulu needs to have an embeddable player unlike that of a YouTube, mainly because players like that are meant for web page viewing of short length videos and are not scalable to contain large volumes of videos."

His experimental multi video players are a solution for that problem. His goal with the media player framework is to build a single media player that is capable of sucking videos from any online source and display them in a way that is TV-like and familiar to users. Yanez also hopes to create a player that can be used on multimedia devices like the Nintendo Wii.

"My goal is to build a media player that integrates with all web video, be easy to use, have a television style feel and have capabilities to be fully integrated with multimedia devices such as the Wii and mobile phones," he writes. "The television without a doubt was one of the biggest inventions of the 20th century. I believe web video is going to be one of the biggest breakthrough's in the 21st century."

In July, when Yanez first released his Joost player, NewTeeVee suggested that Joost should hire him to create a web-based version of their player. We agree. Even better, Sling Media or Tivo should hire Yanez to create a player for the Slingbox that can suck videos off the web and put them on our TVs.