iPad App Review: Stream video to your tablet with the new Boxee iPad app

Having released the Boxee Box late last year, the free media center company Boxee has been hard at work on its next big project — the recently released Boxee iPad app.

Staying social
Firing up the app for the first time takes you to the Boxee home screen. From here, you can stay up to date on the latest content on the web, watching videos recommended by your friends and the Boxee staff.

There are three main columns on the home screen: Featured, Friends, and Watch Later. Featured videos are simply recommendations from the Boxee staff, while the Watch Later section contains videos that you have bookmarked for later viewing — a new feature recently introduced by Boxee.

The Friends section contains videos posted by your friends via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. In order for this feature to work, you must first connect your Boxee account to your favorite social services. This can be done within the app by hitting the cog-shaped settings button in the upper right corner of the screen. From there, simply hit the connect button and follow the on-screen instructions.

While watching a video through the app, you can easily share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr by tapping the heart icon, or share via email by tapping the email icon. Add the video to your Watch Later queue by tapping the clock icon.

Stream your video library
The coolest feature that this app has to offer is the ability to stream video content straight from your computer to your iPad. The app is able to do this thanks to a second piece of free software called the Media Manager, which must be installed on any machine you wish to stream videos from.

Once you have the Media Manager installed, fire up the Boxee iPad app and tap the My Media button in the upper left corner of the screen. This shows you all of the computers that the app can stream from and lets you browse to and watch videos on that particular computer.

In our tests, streaming worked without a hitch and provided excellent video and sound quality. Due to the size of the video files, it comes as no surprise that this feature only works over your local home network. Those of you looking to stream your video library over the internet or 3G will have to look elsewhere.

Boxee Box features
If you happen to own a Boxee Box, you can take advantage of another new feature: the ability to send a video that you are watching on your tablet straight to your TV. This works for videos you are watching online (such as YouTube), as well as videos streaming from your library through the My Media portion of the app. To send a video to your Boxee Box, simply tap the TV icon.

Tecca's take
The Boxee iPad app (available from iTunes) is clean, easy to use, and does exactly what it sets out to do — letting you stream all sorts of video content to your iPad and share your experience with friends. But while the app is good, it's not without its flaws.

While browsing our video library through the My Media portion of the app, we were disappointed to see only simply named folders or files, instead of the full-featured movie posters and TV series icons that we are treated to on the Boxee computer application. We were also discouraged by the fact that there is no search or playlist functionality built into the My Media portion of the app. These would go a long way toward turning a good app into a great app.

At the end of the day, the Boxee iPad app is definitely worth having, and we feel it deserves a solid 4 out of 5 stars. If some of the features we mentioned above find their way into the app, we can easily see this rating changing to a full 5 out of 5 stars.

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