Boxee: TiVo on Steroids

We were at the NY Tech Meetup last night, hosted by Meetup founder Scott Heiferman himself, at the ridiculously gorgeous/high-tech IAC building in Chelsea. In the huge lobby, budding start-ups have five minutes to present their new projects to investors, colleagues and developers. Here's one we were pretty excited about: Boxee. It's like TiVo, iTunes and Netflix... on steroids.

Boxee is what its New York creators call a "social media device." You download it onto your computer, it searches your hard drive and all of your devices (from your iPhone to your iPod) for videos, pictures and music and puts it all into one pretty interface. You can hook it up to your TV at home and get even better visuals.Check out how it looks in the video above, courtesy of Allen Stern at CenterNetworks.

As more people watch TV serials and download shows online, devices like Boxee will make it much easier to navigate your own growing libraries (all those Gossip Girl episodes!) and the ones online. It integrates online services like last.fm, YouTube, CNN and other video sites so you can watch their videos and media. Boxee also searches for trailers, album covers, descriptions and lyrics to the music you're playing so you can do an extra awesome version of karaoke. Your friends can sign up for Boxee and you'll see what they've been listening to and watching on their computers. You can make recommendations to them too, just like on Netflix for movies. Overall, Boxee is exciting because it makes organizing media on your computer so easy (and pretty!) and its social networking features set it apart from the competition.

The best part: it's totally free!

Boxee is still in beta but if it gets some funding after last night's presentation, we'll be one of the first to download.