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An Internet search for TV, movies, and music can bring up hundreds of pages, but a new computer application condenses it all onto one screen. The Israeli-developed Boxee is meant to bring legal media sources such as Hulu.com or Pandora radio together into one source -- controlled through the TV using a remote.

“We want to be the software that runs your living room,” Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing for Boxee, told The Jewish State.

Boxee links computer programs as well as video game consoles, DVD players, laptops, and the TV itself into its system. So far, major players such as MLB.tv, Current.tv, CBS, Netflix, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and photo sharing site Flickr have signed on for their shows to come up in Boxee searches and be part of a new TV watching experience.

“In order to get your entertainment in one place normally, you’d have to surf through a bunch of different Web sites, or open up a music player, or view photos through something else,” Kippen said. “The idea is to bring all of the stuff into one interface and then access it with a remote from your couch,” a concept he referred to as the “10-foot experience.”

Layered on top of the “10-foot experience” is a social networking layer. Drawing mainly from MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, a Boxee user can integrate friends’ lists of favorite films, music, and TV programming into the mix. Kippen said that through the Boxee application, a Facebook or Twitter user could update a profile to reflect what’s being watched or listened to.

“It’s a way to tap into all those social networks you’re already a part of and share information about what you’re watching, see what other people are watching,” Kippen said.

However, unlike social networking sites, Boxee is not meant for people to meet based on common interests, Kippen explained. Instead, it’s a way for friends to recommend shows to watch or music to download.

“The idea behind the social network is that when you make recommendations to people, you can use a generator like Netflix does that recommends [a movie] to you, or you can use human results, like Pandora does,” Kippen said. “[On] Pandora, people listen to the music, rate it, and figure out which makes sense to recommend. We do something similar. We think your friends are the best people to recommend you stuff. That’s why the social layer is there; that generates more valuable recommendations than just a machine that spits out results.”

The program was founded in 2007 by a team of six Israeli friends who now run the company. They were inspired three years prior by working with software for the gaming system Xbox, which allowed digital media to be played through the TV. A group of 11 people headed by ex-IDF soldier Avner Ronen took the software’s platform even further, extending it to what is now Boxee. Ronen, who served in the MAMRAM technology sector of the Israeli army, is now CEO of Boxee and has received several recognitions for his achievements in technology, including Rolling Stone’s “Agents of Change” for 2009. While the majority of the company is based in Israel, there are a handful of employees in the U.S., including San Fransisco-based Kippen.

Since its launch in June 2008, Boxee has 600,000 users and Kippen said it is aiming for one million subscribers by the end of 2009.

“We hear back from a lot of people,” Kippen said. “[Mainly, they say] because of Boxee, they’ve canceled their cable because they can get all their TV shows and movies that they want to watch for free online, so it saves them the money they pay for cable.”

Kippen said that the investment in Boxee saves a lot of money for some people, who only need to purchase a cord and have an Internet connection in order to use the program. Instead of channel surfing, there’s browsing based on friends’ recommendations, but if someone is a new user and doesn’t know anyone else who uses the program, there’s “Abner.” Like “Tom” on MySpace, who is automatically everyone’s “friend,” Abner generates recommendations for the user based on a mix between the personal taste of Boxee staff and sponsored channels.

“We see this as the future of entertainment,” Kippen said. “Everything you want is typed into a search and you have it right away -- you don’t have to worry about recording it or storing it on a computer. It’s streamed to you whenever you want it.”