Boxee announces partnership with Pandora, PBS app and more

Today at Boxee’s meetup in New York it was announced that Boxee will be receiving even more impressive updates. Just as you might have suspected, they’ve found a way around Hulu yet again, and this time, it’s not blockable without taking the entire site down. But there’s more. They now have a partnership with Pandora and a new PBS application.

So how did they do it this time? Get around Hulu, that is? Boxee has tweaked their code, and now they have a new XUL-based framework. In other words, they have basically built a browser into Boxee, meaning you can browse to Hulu’s webpage from within Boxee. So, Hulu is back, whether they like it or not. It would have been easier for them to just cooperate, but in the end, users of Boxee actually benefit since this opens up more ways for content to be distributed.

Boxee’s new partnership with Pandora means users will have access to Pandora’s excellent streaming radio. If you don’t already know what it is, Pandora is a streaming radio station that tailors itself to your tastes in music. Not only can you listen to music, you can actually create new stations from within Boxee. First, you give it a hint on what you like by selecting a band or song. Pandora then generates a station for you with similar artists and songs.All that is left to do is give a thumbs up or down for each song, and it only gets better and more specialized from here on out. Alternatively, you could do what Kevin Rose spent some time doing recently; create the world’s most annoying Pandora station to annoy your friends and coworkers by constantly giving a thumbs up to terrible songs and down to good ones. But you’re not that evil…are you?

Boxee now has a more robust API as well, but that probably doesn’t matter to you right now unless you are a developer. In the future, this will mean more and better content for you the user. For instance, the Pandora app I just got done talking about was built using the new API. And if you’d like to install the new PBS app, make sure you download the newest version of Boxee then do the following. Go to the App Box in the main menu, then Repositories, and add dir.boxeehq.com. Now, you can install it.

And as if Pandora wasn’t enough to satisfy your streaming radio needs, they’ve finished RadioTime. It’s an application that lets you stream over 100 thousand terrestrial radio stations from around the world. I’d say I hear the knell ringing for regular radio, but this is made possible in part by regular radio, so here I am, with my foot in my mouth.

So, if you’re a Boxee user already, be sure to update. And if you haven’t taken Boxee for a spin, then you owe it to your media loving self to at least try it out.

Product [Boxee]