Livestation / Live TV App on Boxee Box

I've had difficulties in recent months getting the Live TV app to work. The Live TV app allows Boxee Box users to watch a range of channels offered by the livestation service (for free). This includes al Jazeera Arabic, al-Jazeera Mubashir, Deutsche Welle TV, and many other channels. Sometimes, particularly after the Boxee Box was not shut down and remained on for a long time, I find that when I start the Live TV app, Livestation does not start. All I say is a log in button. I press it and try to enter my livestation log-in, but nothing happens.
The only solution I found was to reset the settings on the Boxee under Settings.
This also solved problems related to the netflix app, which wouldn't start.

Boxee Box's Netflix app interface disappointing

The Netflix app on Boxee Box is just a list of movie titles and a search function. There is no way to browse titles by genre. There does not seem to be any way to choose a genre and browse through it (e.g. foreign films from Eastern Europe), the way one can do when using the netflix website. I'll have to decide on a movie using my PC I guess.

OpenCourseWare App

I've had a great time today browsing through the OpenCourseWare app which I found under the Education category for the Boxee Box's apps. I'm currently following a course on Financial Markets by Yale professor Robert Shiller.

I did some google searches to figure out where the app is drawing its content from. The Boxee app draws on course lectures from 5 universities (Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and MIT), but there are projects on the internet, such as the OCW Consortium, that have much broader collections. In fact, there are many more collections and offerings. Could the app be changed to take suggestions? Who actually programs these apps? Is it independent programmers or Boxee programmers? If it is the latter, then I'd be worried that they'd find it hard to keep up with interests. They'd be better off following the wikipedia model of independent creators.

Arabic Satellite TV, Israeli media offerings on the Boxee Box

The Boxee Box has an App to connect to LiveStation, a service that offers free access to al-Jazeera, al-Jazeera Mubashir, BBC Arabic, France 24 Arabic, Rusiya al-Youm (Russia's Arabic satellite TV station) and a number of other interesting offerings. For now, there is definitely enough content to keep me happy.

There is no access to Israel's Channel 1, Channel 2 or Channel 10 through LiveStation. I have yet to find an app on my boxee that will allow me to view Israeli news.

The boxee box web browser was unable to get the main channel 1 news program (Mabat) or any other content working. Not sure if this is an issue with flash support or with the coding of the Israel Broadcasting Authority's website (iba.org.il) or with the CastUp streaming program that they use. Radio stations on the IBA website also did not play.

I went to Galgalatz and Galatz next using the Boxee Box web browser and was also unable to get the websites to play.

After this setback, I searched the Boxee Box apps by category and looked for Radio. I was surprised to see that there were very few radio apps. I randomly clicked on TuneIn radio which said it has local radio options. I was happy to see that there was a "browse by location" option. You first select the continent you'd like to browse (Israel is under Asia), then choose Israel. There were about 5 listening options. Galgalatz and Galatz were among them (although they did not work because of a streaming error). There was a religious radio offering (Mevaser Tov or something like that), a university radio station and two other radio stations that I did not know. Other than Galgalatz and galatz, none of the other state-owned radio stations were available (e.g. Reshet A, Reshet B, Reshet G).

I was amazed that there were quite a few offerings for radio stations from the Arab world in TuneIn, so that's a plus.

I'll have to see if there are other apps out there that have additional radio offerings.

Introduction

I purchased the Boxee Box, a media streaming device, yesterday to do two things:

1) Allow me to quickly and conveniently watch and listen to news from Israel and the Arab world in my living room without having to turn on my computer and without having a mess of cables

2) Watch netflix or other streamed subscriber content

This blog will describe my successes and challenges.