Boxee unveils the Boxee Beta and Boxee Box

Boxee has launched the next version of their incredibly popular platform, Boxee Beta. At their packed unveiling event today in New York, Boxee showed off the brand new user-interface and released details on the Boxee Box, built by D-Link. The Boxee Beta will be available to some early access users, but should be available to the public on January 7th at the upcoming CES event.

So, let’s take a quick look at the new Boxee Beta and Boxee Box; here’s a breakdown of the most important and awaited features.

Boxee Beta

Likely the biggest difference you’ll notice from the current Boxee Alpha is the re-designed home screen and menus. The idea being to make your content more accessible and to make the experience a little more social. The menu takes center stage, with a feed of your friends viewing habits from Boxee, Twitter and Facebook, the “featured” content from Boxee staff and partners, along with the latest episodes of your favorite shows and anything else you’re waiting to watch.

The new menu system gives you more control over your media, giving you all the usual options in three tiers. The first gives logout, settings, queue, feed and history. The second offers your media: Photos, Music, Movies, Home, TV Shows, Apps and any other Files. The third menu tier collects together shortcuts to your favorite content, apps and folders.

It’s also worth a mention that—not a minute too soon—the new Boxee Beta will have official support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. You would likely not notice much difference otherwise, but it’s nice to know there’s someone to call if something isn’t quite going to plan.

Boxee Box

It’s great having such control over your media through a beautifully designed user interface on your computer, but there are times where you’d like to watch your favorite TV show while still surfing the net. If you’re like this too, you might want to check out the new Boxee Box. The bottom line, it’s the hardware equivalent of the Boxee Beta that can hook up to your TV via a HDMI port. Connecting through either LAN or WiFi, you have access to the Internet as well as the content store on your computer from the comfort of living room.

Another angle would be to install the upcoming Boxee Beta onto your Apple TV, but if you’d rather not shell out for an Apple TV (it’s worth noting we don’t know the price of the Boxee Box yet) or you simply can’t resist the ingenious design of the Boxee Box (and let’s face it—Apple users are suckers for great design), then the Boxee Box could be a great solution. It’ll be running the same software, and will come with a remote control so switching between Boxee on your computer and Boxee through the Boxee Box will be a breeze.

We’ll hopefully have a review of the new software when we get our hands on it. Until then, you can head over to the Boxee blog post listing all the new and noteworthy features.