The previous OUYA updates were certainly exciting. This latest one however seems to take the cake. If you recall back to one of my articles on the OUYA, where I talked about gamers wanting more than just a gaming machine by adding XMBC support, it looks like that is now a reality.
In the most recent update, the OUYA team revealed that XMBC will indeed be on the OUYA.
That’s right. The award-winning, open source media player and entertainment hub is coming to OUYA. We’ve heard many of you buzzing about a potential OUYA-XBMC hook-up since Day One of launch. (Something of a match made in open source heaven!) Now, with a few hours left in our drive, we’re delivering.
This is what Nathan Betzen from the XMBC team stated:
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe it was because of the hundreds, if not thousands, of demands on Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook, in Reddit, and in Kickstarter comments. Maybe it's because many of Team OUYA support XBMC, and nearly a third of Team XBMC members are OUYA backers.
Regardless, we are delighted to announce that XBMC will be working with OUYA to ensure that XBMC works well on the OUYA platform. OUYA's Android underpinnings and XBMC's work on Android (soon to be merged into master, pending final sign-offs!) will dramatically speed up that effort, as will early XBMC dev access to OUYA prototypes.
The conversation between our two teams is young, but talk is ongoing and positive. We look forward to providing more exciting news on this front as it develops.
Additionally, it was announced that OUYA partnered with TuneIn, which is a free service that lets people listen to music, sports and news from wherever they are. It includes over 70,000 stations and two million on-demand programs. Not too shabby!
The icing on the cake however are the latest renders of the OUYA which indeed proves that it is quite a small machine. The controller is shown being held, which also reveals that it is quite smaller than what we originally thought.
