Boxee: WebTV That Makes Sense. Is That Good or Bad for Big Cable?
by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 12, 2009 at 10:19 AM PT
This year’s Consumer Electronic Show, like every year’s CES, was peppered with big talk about merging your PC and your TV, led by a new widget initiative from Yahoo (YHOO). And my reaction was the same one I have every year: Why?
No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”
Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.
The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.
It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?
This is also why I’m not sure how long the big cable companies will allow Boxee to operate unfettered. As the recent dispute between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom (VIA) illustrates, the cable operators are increasingly dismayed about paying the cable networks big fees for their content, only to find them giving it away online. And with Boxee providing customers with a real opportunity to drop cable TV in favor of a broadband connection, I worry that it’s a matter of time before they find some way to throttle the company.
Technically, the cable guys (and the telcos, who are also in the TV business) aren’t supposed to be able to do anything about Boxee. They’re just supposed to act as a dumb pipe serving up high-speed Internet access and keep their mouths shut. In the real world, I don’t think that’s going to fly. See: The many bandwidth caps the cable guys are starting to experiment with, which are aimed at heavy Web video users.
Boxee founder Avner Ronen disagrees, of course. He thinks the cable guys will want to work with his company (he plans to make money by licensing his software to gadget makers and extracting fees from content providers like Netflix, but that’s all down the line). And maybe he’s right: When I dropped by his CES booth on Friday, he was being swarmed by emissaries from CableLabs, the cable guys’ tech consortium. They were the third group of cable execs to visit the company that day.
I’ll let Ronen make his case in the video below; and I’ve also included a brief demo video from the company. But that clip doesn’t really do Boxee justice. Ask one of the 100,000 super-early adopters who are using the software themselves. Or any of the nervous cable guys who saw it last week.
quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.
Comments
My personal belief is that the Cable and Satellite guys will be all over Boxee (in a good way) for the simple reason that they get that fighting, ignoring and or trying to overly control the broadband medium is a surefire way to irrelevance.
It’s a paradox, to be sure, as these guys are the consummate toll bridge operators, but then again, we live in a paradoxical world.
As to your aversion to the socializing and information sharing/interactive elements of the medium, it is worth noting that: A) this is a fundamental part of what Boxee does; and B) just because you have access to an added set of “volume controls” doesn’t mean that you have to use them or that they have to be set perpetually on LOUD.
For what it’s worth, I blogged on the state of this medium in a post called:
What it Means to be a “Social” Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect
http://thenetworkgarden.com/we.....nect-.html
Check it out if interested.
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at January 12th, 2009 at 11:39 amHey Mark. Where did I say I was averse to socializing/information sharing? As it turns out, I’m not terribly interested in those capabilities – in part because they’re going to be standard for any kind of media center, and in part because contrary to what my Twitter feed might indicate, I don’t want to share everything all the time. Sometimes I just want to watch TV. Whoever lets me do that, with the least amount of friction, wins.
Posted by Peter Kafka at January 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pmApologize if I parsed the point to tight. I took your comment “No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage” as lack of interest in the functionality, but it seems more your issue is the forced aspect (i.e., lack of volume controls) which I 100% agree on.
Sometimes I wanna lean forward, other times lean back. Sometimes I want to auto capture and aggregate, other times I want to be invisible.
Cheers,
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at January 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pmI certainly hope ideas like this catch on.
The trick is to make the technology so cheap, in the form of add-on circuitry (and software) that can be tacked on to existing TVs or built-in to new ones… so cheap that the monopolists such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple as well as the cable, phone and other broadband companies have no interest in trying to corner the market on the capability, but instead focus on content.
Since nothing about this technology was un-doable 10 years ago it remains frustrating that we’ve had to wait for a generation of consumers to die and be replaced by a new generation that understands the concept of on-demand content (I regularly run into people my age that just don’t get it and don’t understand why I have no interest in standard cable offerings). Similarly, we have to wait for a generation of corporate leadership to be overturned (one way or another) to have products that can fill this need.
No doubt meetings continue in Redmond and Cupertino trying to figure out how to make sure that everyone that wants on-demand content will have to have a copy of Windows, or an Apple device or some sort so that we can trade one set of gatekeepers for another.
My hope is that the “kids” will be too smart to fall for any of their schemes.
Posted by Mac Beach at January 12th, 2009 at 1:45 pmI’ve been using Boxee since mid-December. My reaction was that it’s great news for independent producers… Here’s why:
1) As Jerry Seinfeld once said “when you’re on tv, you’re on tv… it doesn’t matter if it’s cable or network.” He said this in the 80s, btw.
2) With Boxee, it doesn’t matter if you’re on cable, web, network, whatever.
3) Boxee allows social networks to promote your show. It makes it easy for fans of what you make to tell their friends… and they can watch it ON TV.
Good for everyone!
Now, if Boxee can just figure out how to pay independents!
Posted by fred graver at January 13th, 2009 at 10:29 am