Boxee CEO Avner Ronen Gets a Crash Course in the TV Business
by Peter Kafka
Posted on March 13, 2009 at 5:00 AM PT
When I first met Avner Ronen in January, the Boxee CEO was beaming. His Web video company was one of the breakout hits at the Consumer Electronics Show.
But when I had lunch with Ronen yesterday, he was much more subdued. Going head-to-head against the TV establishment can take the wind out of you.
In the span of two months, Boxee has gone from obscure start-up to an irritant or worse for the TV business.
That’s because Boxee, which makes it easy to sort and play video you grab from the Web, symbolizes a real threat for the established players: That one day, many consumers will consume most of their TV via video they find on the Web. And then they’ll cut TV networks and cable operators out of the picture.
That’s a long way from happening, but just the notion of it seemed to be enough for GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, which apparently forced their Hulu joint venture to stop working with Boxee last month.
Now Hulu and Boxee are in a cat-and-mouse game, whereby Boxee’s engineers try to find ways to get Hulu’s stuff onto their browsers and the Hulu guys try to stop them. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)
Ronen isn’t optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon. He also says the past few months have taught him how little he knew about the media business prior to starting Boxee in 2007. Had he known how entrenched and complicated the relationships between broadcasters, programmers, cable networks and cable operators are, he says, he might never have tried to get the company going.
But Ronen still figures he’ll thrive in the long run. He notes that some big media companies that aren’t NBC and Fox–Netflix (NFLX) and Disney’s (DIS) ABC, for instance–have been happy to work with Boxee, or at least not to complain about the service.
I’ll let him explain why, and lay out Boxee’s future plans (which included a beta launch this summer and Boxee-enabled devices next year) in this video interview.
And if, like me, you’re going to be in Austin for South By Southwest on Saturday, you can ask him yourself, at a panel discussion where he’ll share the stage with College Humor’s Ricky Van Veen and B.J. Novak of “The Office.”
Comments
Traditional distribution providers can kick and scream all they want, but they would be better served by getting on the bandwagon sooner rather than later. Like cell phones and digital music stores before them, web-based TV is the future.
I have no need for a land-line, haven’t had a working CD player for years, and I just cancelled my cable. I am part of the most sought-after demographic for advertisers. Why would Hulu take away the one chance they’ve got to show me ads?
Posted by Dalton Rooney at March 13th, 2009 at 7:16 amcrash course indeed
we made a conscious decision to continue to have the user at the top of our priority list. the industry may take a while to adjust but the users are not waiting..
Posted by avner ronen at March 13th, 2009 at 8:05 amI couldn’t agree more. Traditional video content providers should observe that the music content providers are now selling unprotected files via iTunes – after trying to control distribution for over a decade – and failing. Advertising is the method that works for monetizing content – and Boxee gives a way to keep those ads (which they want to do) without folks just going to BitTorrent to get the content in a higher quality adfree environment. The content providers would be smart to just deal with it… No cable here – just Netflix and Hulu. (and an Apple TV with all my DVDs ripped to it via Handbrake) I own all the content in it, but I view and listen to no plastic discs anymore…
Posted by Aaron Booker at March 13th, 2009 at 8:27 amAvner and Mike Ramsay, TiVo’s co-founder, could commiserate over a beer.
Posted by Jonathan Marcus at March 13th, 2009 at 9:17 amWhat will be interesting to see play out, and where I think Boxee is playing their cards right is that folks like Hulu (and most of the big media cos) already have embeddable video and RSS-based syndication of same to encourage viral distribution and maximize reach of their content.
So long as Boxee is not mucking with their video player constructs and in video ad revenue sources, big media is going to have a hard time saying “we want Twittering Jim to spread our content but not Boxee.”
That’s why I liked the agility when Hulu formally blocked Boxee for Boxee to turn around pretty much in real time and leverage the RSS feeds of Hulu.
Hearkens back to the old MCI ads where they show how MCI had to fight big telcos all the way to the supreme court (or something like that) to break the long distance monopoly.
Obviously, Boxee prays it doesn’t go that path, but it starts to become a losing PR battle for Big Media when they start blocking upstarts from doing the exact same thing they are encouraging consumers to do with their content.
For more fodder on the social media center space, check out:
What it Means to be a “Social” Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect
http://bit.ly/qc5hA
Cheers,
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at March 13th, 2009 at 9:49 amYeah, Boxee is basically just a type of browser that is couch-potato friendly and is not circumventing the ad revenue, so the content owners wanting to block Boxee but having public RSS feeds shows that they really don’t get what they’ve unleashed. I think the execs who demanded Boxee be blocked think that somehow Boxee is THE WAY to get internet content onto their living room tv, and thus is the direct competition to broadcast model also watched on that same living room tv. But they fail to realize the game has changed, and its NOT the device that displays the content that is dividing the audiences, its how they get the content. Not recognizing that a tv these days is a glorifed second monitor is a key point. If the industry thinks users that were using Boxxee will now go back to traditional broadcast so they can use their tv, they are missing the point. I suspect the vast majority of boxxee users of Hulu will simply start watching hulu on the same tv via a standard browser sans boxee, or simply torrent the show. The apple TV boxxee hack users are basically the losers here, as they are the ones who didnt even have access to hulu content until this (and this issue exposes why I think AppleTV is a fatally flawed concept until it opens up to web content more). All other Boxxee fans will just keep getting the content off ip somehow. Big Media would prefer you to go back to watching at boradcast since they make more money on ads that way currently, but they need to wake up to the fact that folks using Boxxee are most likely already gone from the broadcast worldview…its not hulu ad vs tv ad…its hulu ad or NO ad…
Posted by James Abele at March 13th, 2009 at 10:03 am