After featuring Boxee on PSFK recently, we were invited to meet the founder to find out more about their media-center software. In a way, Boxee is a browser of multimedia content that can work on your computer or through your AppleTV. Through Boxee you can watch TV, play music and view image content that’s available on the web or on your hard drive or home network.
Since its launch in mid-2008 over 300,000 people have registered for the service and hundreds of developers are manipulating the open-source code to develop the system further. We talked to founder Avner Ronen about his motivations behind the development of this service and why the TV and film industries need to pay attention to this type of technology – fast.
Why Boxee?
Boxee was created out of the frustration of getting media through our TVs. For years we’ve had Windows Media Centers, TIVO and Apple Front Row but none of them seemed to work very well. Apple and Microsoft have seemed to neglect this space so we decided to make a “Firefox play” where we wanted to create a great open product with a focus on the user, not the system. We engage the community because we know that we don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.
How would you describe Boxee?
It’s a browser – a media browser. We display content that can be found on the internet – but presented with a remote-control wielding user in mind. This is for the lean back experience in your living room or bedroom through your big screen. It’s a different mindset and you have to approach this differently than website design.
The system also allows the user to access any of their own personal content. iTunes is a great system but if you want to play non-iTunes content (e.g. DivX films) then you can’t use it. We thought we could do a better job. boxee lets people access their content on their at-home computer systems and the web. People want to mix their mp3 collection with LastFM and ripped video.
We’ve been playing with Boxee on the AppleTV system. Once you make the leap (of working out how to hack it) we found it to be a great system.
This is an example of where the community helped us. A couple of users took the code and adjusted it to the Mac OS system the AppleTV has and then offered a hack for AppleTV owners to download. Boxee is not optimized for AppleTV but nevertheless over 100,000 users have downloaded the software.
You have referred to people’s home television sets as a Big Screen. Isn’t that a term we used to use for cinema screens?
The TV is the largest screen we have an intimate relationship with – as opposed to a mobile screen.
You stream the content providers ads and there is no obvious commerce or advertising play. What is the business model?
We want to matter. We are going to focus on improving the product and growing the user base. Then we can associate content with retail partners and gain a commission through affiliate and other deals. We are also going to license our software to devices. We should be making revenues from licensing by 2010.
Tell us more about this need to matter.
When we started, we looked at whether we should be in the experience game, or the systems game but we realized that we should be in the getting the stuff game. To do this we need to:
1. Help users watch what they want. We need to solve this and be excellent at it.
2. We want to overcome the challenge of discovery. You know you want to find something to watch or liten to – you just don’t know what. Through social connections, we help users understand what is popular and what is trending.
3. Users want to connect with their media. They expect that they can act on their media. They want to share with friends and family.
4. We want to offer contextual discovery. Media should be hyperlinked. If you touch TV media then there should be anchors to content about the director and actors and so on. If you’re listening to Last.FM through the system then you could soon see recommendations to see videos on MTV of the artists that you’re watching.
Why now?
TV has not innovated because it has been controlled. It has not been open. We’re seeing the mobile market open up very quickly with iPhone and Google Mobile apps. This is going to happen in the TV space – bypassing the control of the networks and cable operators.
Not everyone is happy though – a nervous Hulu, the web-TV channel from NBC Universal has asked Boxee to remove their content from the service. A request you have complied with.
We were asked to take down the Hulu feed and we took it down in good faith. We have asked to engage with content partners and understand their concerns. We’re dealing with a huge industry here which is complex, involves billions of dollars changing hands and has very complicated legal issues. With Boxee many of the old ways of doing things come into question.
Do you think the content owners will listen?
We believe it’s better to engage in talks. To do this we involved our user base – we set up a Wiki and asked our users to write the pitch we should present content owners. You can find it here. It’s important companies interact with these early adopters and learn lessons now not later.
Couldn’t the content owners all just gang together and kill Boxee and any other similar system?
What is the alternative? If you take away the legal option of accessing this content then the user is still going to find a way of accessing it. We have seen this happen before. The music industry didn’t work out what to do until the illegal sharing of music became so popular that you couldn’t stop it. There’s a whole generation who will never buy music – but they may buy a gig ticket or merchandize.
The sharing of TV content is not at that popular stage yet. It is not too late. We have to work out a system where everyone benefits. If you shut down the system users will just find a way to get the content and the number of users ‘illegally sharing TV content’ will grow until we reach tipping point.
Thank You, Avner!
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