Thursday, Boxee released a new version of their media center software, which was fitted with support for Netflix Watch Instantly streaming movies.
The new feature enables Boxee users to browse and search through Netflix's library, an option that is not available to Roku’s box and Microsoft's Xbox 360 users, who can only view videos from their saved queues.

Moreover, where the aforementioned two devices are concerned, special hardware is required, along with an Xbox Live Gold membership for the Xbox 360, whereas Boxee’s streaming service runs on any Intel-Mac or Linux personal computer.

For the time being, the media center’s support for Netflix Watch Instantly streaming movies is not available to computers running on the Windows operating system, or to AppleTV version of Boxee. The reason the service does not yet run on the AppleTV version is that the platform Netflix uses to stream movies, Microsoft Silverlight, requires a 1.83GHz dual-core Intel processor and Apple TV is fitted with only a 1GHz “Crofton” processor.

Boxee has also added a tool that uses MTV to show videos of the songs users have in their libraries, where possible.

Furthermore, the media center now supports YouTube videos encoded in h.264 and has brought forth new interfaces for Hulu, CNN, Picasa, YouTube and Flickr.

Also, Boxee has added support for the Boston Globe's The Big Picture blog, which allows users to transfer high-resolution pictures from The Big Picture to their television sets.

The media center has announced that support for Netflix Watch Instantly streaming movies for computers running on Windows was in the works, but no details on a release date were given out.