Thanks to a rather clever feature of justin.tv, I've been able to pick out a couple of clips from the recent Boxee App Challenge event in San Francisco. In the first clip judge Cali Lewis has some very kind words for our entry and in the second clip Boxee CEO Avner Ronen talks about the OpenCourseWare and Open University apps making some quite interesting points about what sort of content Boxee users are after. OpenCourseWare went on to win the Judges' award signaling a potentially very bright future for education services on interactive TV.

The Open University Podcasts application was created for the Boxee App Developer Challenge 2009. My first time developing for interactive TV, this application used the Boxee API, a custom Drupal module, Python and RSS. Graphic and user interface design was by Dave Winter.

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Today is a big day, we find out tonight how well the Open University entry has done in the Boxee App Development challenge. A small team of us had been thinking about big screen (web experiences designed for interactive television to be viewed at about ten feet away) web sites and what an OU experience might be like in such a setting. When the challenge was announced it was a fantastic opportunity to quickly develop something to get ourselves started in this exciting area, so we decided to go for it and in about four weeks went from having nothing to having a fully working application, complete with full user interface and graphic design by Dave Winter, client and server side code by me and communications, testing and creative input by Stuart Brown and Matt Rawlinson. It was hard work which gobbled up a few evenings and weekends but it was worth it.

Back in January I wrote about a piece of software that I think has a very bright future in Boxee makes your TV social. One of the great features of Boxee is that it will take standard podcast feeds and then allow you to enjoy these podcasts through the software and potentially on your TV. At the Open University, where I work, we publish a wide variety of podcasts on all sorts of subjects and these are made available through a wide variety of platforms including standard RSS feeds, iTunesU and Miro. However it hasn't been possible until now to just drop a link into Boxee to let it discover all of the podcasts on offer. This is because the site structure of the podcasts website is described using an OPML format file which holds the information on the navigation required to get to the various podcasts. Boxee does not understand OPML, but today a new facility has been added to provide a Boxee compatible feed that will let you use one link that enables Boxee to discover everything the OU Podcasts website has to offer.