The Inquisitr » boxee

We heard you like Boxee so we put your Boxee in a Box: Boxee Box confirmed

Kim LaCapria — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:52:04 +0000

Popular content streaming application Boxee confirmed plans this week to unveil a “Boxee Box” to streamline the process of using Boxee with your TV.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen announced a December 7th event in Brooklyn (holla!) where details of the device and mockups (like the one shown above) will be revealed. (You can RSVP to the event on the Boxee blog.) About the deal, Ronen says:

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

Ronen goes on to talk about forging the connection between computers/devices and TV, which remains a huge stumbling block for consumers who wish to use services like Hulu and Boxee. People constantly tell me to use them, but I rarely have the self control to put my laptop down and lack the initiative to hook my devices to my TV. A dedicated box is perfect for lazy consumers like myself that are interested in the service but not as keen of getting off our asses to access it.

Ronen describes the uses the Boxee box is expected to have:

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc.

More details as they’re released.

Myka ION HD Player Provides Hulu And Boxee Access In A Nice Package

James Allen Johnson — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:27:10 +0000

The Myka ION HD player as the name would suggest provides NVIDIA ION graphics with Hulu and Boxee support all from one centralized location. The device also provides PC application support for XBMC and other options and provides the ability to “browse to any web site and play video content directly onto your TV.”

The base model starts at $379 with basic WiFi access, while Wireless-N and Blu-ray add-ons can quickly run the system price up to $644.

The systems regardless of model include a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom 330 CPU processor, while up to 4GB RAM and ten USB 2.0 ports are available. Video out options are also abundant in the form of VGA / DVI and HDMI with an eSATA connector, Ethernet and a bunch of useful audio outputs. [SlipperyBrick]

Boxee Beta Set For December 7th Private Trial Release

James Allen Johnson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:34:24 +0000

Boxee has officially been announced for a private beta release on December 7th 2009. The program is capable of streaming TV and movies to HDTV’s with a remote content option much like those featured on Hulu and Netflix. The program also offers music and photo capabilities and it works with Mac, Windows and Apple TV.

The new beta version is a drastic turn from the previously released alpha version with better shortcuts and overall navigation, a new search option for movies and TV show categories and a custom que to avoid constantly jumping between your choices and the main menu.

While an invite only beta is set for December 7th, the general public will have to wait until January 7th 2010 if they want to try out the program. [Electronista]

$6m in funding uploaded to Boxee

Kim LaCapria — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:17:18 +0000

Boston-based General Catalyst lead a new round of capital-infusion for Boxee, a company that saw $4m roll in in December from some of the same partners.

In a statement on their blog, Boxee announced the second round of funding:

We are happy to announce that Boxee closed a $6M round of financing led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join our board.

We closed our Series A late last year, but given the momentum and opportunities we’ve seen over the past few months, we thought it made sense to bring in a new partner and additional funds.

General Catalyst brings more than just money to the table. We wanted a partner to help us as we strengthen our relationships with big media and cable companies. As we learned (the hard way), it is a complicated world.. Neil and General Catalyst as a firm have years of experience, deep understanding, and extensive network in these industries, and we are looking forward to working together with them.

Boxee also let us in on what they plan to do with the funding. Boxee wants to focus on shoring up the service, which won’t be in beta until this fall, as well as adding more content . They also indicated a push to entice developers, and enhance and monetize Boxee’s App Store, which they say “needs some love.”

Another focus of the new funding is broadening Boxee’s reach beyond those intrepid folks who will connect a computer to a TV. It may seem like no big deal, but we all have those co-workers who can’t connect their own mice, so making Boxee more “accessible for a mainstream consumer” could be make or break for the fledgling service.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen spoke to CNet about hopes that Hulu will play nice, soon, too:

“I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners,” CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. “And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu.”

“Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users,” Ronen said.

Why the rest of us couldn’t care less if Hulu is pulled from Boxee

Steven Hodson — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:40:07 +0000

I finally have had a chance to play around with Boxee and it sure seems to be a great way to watch video content on your television screen or computer monitor. The social aspect of it all; like most things social related these days could be a real winner for the service. On the whole it looked like Boxee had a winning formula on its hands until US viewers were informed of a big change in Boxee’s line-up of providers.

You see the majority of Boxee’s television related programming comes via the hottest video property on the web right now – Hulu. The thing is that Hulu itself is really just a content provider that has agreements with the various television networks to provide their shows via the Hulu player on the web. So what you had was one content provider providing it’s content to yet another video content provider who didn’t have any agreements in place with either Hulu or Hulu’s video providers.

As confusing as this sounds it gets even worse when the originating video providers told Hulu to stop making the content available via Boxee. This pretty well took the majority of Boxee’s content right out of play. Of course there was some uproar when happened but not as much as you would think. The reason for this is because to countries outside of the US Hulu is a non-player in the global video market.

So when Boxee announced that they would be pulling all Hulu provided content from the comments may have lit up from angry Americans but garnered nothing but a big yawn from the rest of the world. This of course is due to Hulu’s geotarding of its content so that it can only be viewed by US residents. This geotarding of course carried over to Hulu content played through Boxee so not only did non Americans lose out so did Boxee because all the really good content came primarily from its Hulu connection.

This problem isn’t the fault of either Boxee or Hulu but that of television networks who still haven’t gotten a clue about how this new fangled thing called the Internet works.

Hulu cuts off Boxee, Old Media takes one step forward, two steps back

Duncan Riley — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:39:35 +0000

Users of the growingly popular Boxee media platform will no longer have access to Hulu, after the Fox/ NBC JV decided that letting people watch programs for free where they want wasn’t part of the game plan.

Hulu didn’t elaborate on the reasons behind the move, saying only in a post that

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

The real reason though comes back to the threat Boxee represents. In a tight market where cable subscriptions are heading down and TV networks are bleeding advertisers, services such as Boxee offer TV or cable like convenience without the same costs, and likewise the revenue streams expected by old media. Boxee was too much of a substitute for Fox and NBC to handle, and in taking one step forward with Hulu itself, and now taking two steps back by locking up that content by restricting where it can be played.

The net result is easy to predict. More piracy of content, and NBC and Fox lose even more. A short sighted decision from myopic media companies.

Boxee takes $4 millon

Duncan Riley — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:25:35 +0000

Media sharing platform Boxee has taken $4 million Series A in a round from Spark Capital and Union Square Venture. As part of the deal, Boxee gets Fred Wilson on their board.

We last wrote about Boxee in August after I had seen them demo at Gnomedex. It was, and still is a beautiful product with a great use case, but my query today remains as it did back then: I just don’t see a solid business model, least not yet.

The key though is getting Boxee licensed onto set top boxes, despite the fact that the platform is currently offered for free and is open source. The $4 million is to do exactly that, and we can only presume that there will be value adding on top of what is being offered now, and that’s where the money will come in.

Boxee is still in private beta, so you’ll need to put your name down and wait for an invite. You can even use a hack to install it on an Apple TV which I did…only to find 3 days later that the Apple TV auto-updated and wiped the hack. I must get around to reinstalling it.

Here’s their presentation from Gnomedex:

(via VentureBeat)

Boxee

Boxee: Brilliant UI, shame about the business plan

Duncan Riley — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:28:10 +0000

Live video by Ustream

Boxee presented at Gnomedex this afternoon (video above) and there was hardly a person in the room who wasn’t completely wowed. For those not familiar with the product, Boxee is a media sharing platform targeted at the television, and will be available across multiple platforms (Mac/ Linux/ Windows). The focus of the product is the user interface, both visually and ease of use, and without doubt they’ve mastered both. I’m looking forward to getting into the Alpha program so I can use it myself. Also built in is social sharing and recommendations, so it’s media center 2.0 to some extent.

One small problem though: the business plan. The platform is open source to allow third party development, so they won’t be selling it. Direct sales, tie-ins with digital media providers like Amazon or doing it themselves, obvious ways to make money from something like this, no, not that either. Instead they’re pursuing what I can only describe as an affiliate/ Adsense style strategy. They called it the Firefox (Mozilla) business plan, where they get a cut of the ads shown on recommended services. Nice idea at the small scale, and it works well with Firefox because of the serious dollars involved in search advertising, but to expect a cut from providers such as Hulu from pre-rolls on video in a market where the monetization of online video is still a serious challenge…well lets just say it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Having said that though, I really do hope it works out for them. I can still like a product and hope it goes well even if the business plan was written by a 14 year old with a Blogspot blog who thinks Adsense is where it’s at