Odysseus

Boxee is an open source platform which is designed to replace traditional set top boxes and allow users to navigate personal media such as movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as online content from providers such as Hulu, Youtube, Netflix, Last.fm and many others. One appealing aspect of Boxee is that it provides an extensive API allowing developers to build and seamlessly integrate new applications.

Another key application for this project is Skype. Skype is a Voice over IP (VoIP) application which allows users to make video and telephone calls over the internet; at no cost when calling other Skype users or at significantly lower costs than traditional telecom operators when calling landline and cellular numbers. Skype now has significant market penetration with a user base in excess of 520 million globally; this is continuing to grow and has attracted an extra 40 million users in the last 3 months alone.

The goal of this project will be to develop a Boxee application which can interact with a Skype application running on the set top box. Since many users now use Boxee in place of a normal set top box, Skype integration has a number of benefits. The basic functionality would allow users to make and receive Skype voice calls from within Boxee, pausing and muting the media content when a call is active.

Once this basic integration is complete there are a number of extra functionalities which can be developed, these include:

· Development of a Skype profile within Boxee to allow intelligent functionality depending on what the user is doing. For example, if a user is watching a movie they may not want to be disturbed by incoming calls except from a limited set of contacts.

· Integration of Skype video calling. This would allow a user to make/receive a video call and show the video call as an overlay within Boxee.

· Another extension would be to allow remote users to watch a movie together. This would incorporate the video calling capability to allow users to see each other as they watch the movie.

· Extend the remote watching capability to allow both users to control the video content playing on both Boxee instances. One nice use case for this is that it would allow a user to pause the video on both the local and the remote side and have a brief chat over the existing video call.

Links to additional information
http://www.boxee.tv/
http://developer.boxee.tv/Main_Page
http://www.skype.com
https://developer.skype.com/