* Photo: Jeff Mermelstein * Now, I don't want to wind up in hell. But if that fate befalls me, I anticipate finding my cable provider roasting alongside me. In fact, cable television service in general has a reek of Hades about it. Consumers typically have only one cable company available to them, and that company often chooses its channel lineup based on business relationships instead of on what people want to watch. The customer service would shame Stalin. Plus, cable costs too much—and the price keeps rising.

So why not replace it with all the free video available on the Internet? After all, you can get new and old TV shows on the networks' Web sites, movies on Netflix (all-you-can-eat for subscribers), and everything else on YouTube. The problem is that television is really best watched on, well, a television. The canonical viewing position—horizontal—requires balancing a laptop on your belly.

Enter Boxee, an open source application that, according to CEO Avner Ronen, strives to be the Firefox of video. The global browser funnels all that Internet content, as well as media you've downloaded, to your television. Though Boxee is still in its early stages, a couple hundred thousand head-firsters have already checked it out, most of them using the otherwise superfluous Apple TV box as the conduit for getting online content to the boob tube.

I wanted in.

Installing Boxee on a computer is straightforward. But running it on an Apple TV requires a bit of perseverance. You have to copy the software to a flash drive that can boot up the Apple TV. After a restart, Boxee pops up in the menu choices. But when I selected it, my screen briefly displayed an Apple logo sliced in half, then went black. The fallback method uses a laptop to access the Apple TV's operating system and paste in code to reprogram the device.

To my astonishment, this worked.

Boxee is alpha software, so it's hard to assess its features fairly. The social networking that's built in, which lets you see what your friends have watched, looks promising. And the clean interface lets you surf through not only your own media collection but also online video sources like CBS.com, CNN.com, and Hulu, as well as audio providers like NPR.org. What I really wanted to do was watch 30 Rock, so I selected Hulu from the Internet Videos menu, then chose the most recent episode. Too bad you can't do this anymore. Hulu has since asked Boxee to remove its service, much to the chagrin of couch potatoes everywhere. Thankfully, other video purveyors aren't so short-sighted.

If services like Boxee are to live up to our hi-def dreams, they won't just need content providers to let them grow. They will also require broadband access with more speed and reliability than most people have now. Unfortunately, most of us connect to the Internet via cable or telecom companies that are also in the business of selling video.

It's hard to imagine these companies cutting themselves off by making it easy to get broadband without television. "At the end, I don't think cable is going away," admits Boxee's Ronen, even as his service shows how easy it would be for cable to disappear. It makes sense to use the Internet as another way to distribute ad-supported content for free while letting users subscribe to premium services separately. Platforms like Boxee would allow anyone to distribute a TV channel, without begging or buying permission from the cable, telecom, and satellite czars.

Sounds good to me. And if the monopolists use their power to stave off progress, you know where I'll see them.

Email steven_levy@wired.com.

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