Boxee, the well known media center application that originally began as a fork from the community created XBMC project, announced today at the NewTeeVee Live Conference that they will be partnering with a consumer electronics manufacturer to produce and sell a Boxee-branded connected device. The also announced that they expect to have Boxee technology embedded in other connected hardware devices sometime in 2010, although the details of what that could mean has yet to be determined, i.e., networked TV, game console, Blu-Ray player, set-top-box, etc. Boxee’s move to hardware is a bold, but certainly not unexpected move for the young start-up company as they attempt to bring both local downloaded content and Internet video to TVs in the living room. All kinds of companies have been trying to bridge that gap, with the race kicked off by Apple’s AppleTV in March 2007, yet that device never became the raging consumer success so many analysts expected. Since then, other entries in the field have included players both big and small, including Popcorn Hour, Mvix, Netgear, D-Link with DivX , Western Digital, and countless others, but again none of them have really taken off. The only recognizable success has been the Netflix-powered box from Roku that was able to leverage the Netflix back catalogue and a low price point of $99 to gain an appreciable foothold and kick off Netflix’s streaming business in a big way.
A Boxee device will benefit from the relatively high name recognition Avner Ronen and his team have achieved with excellent consumer outreach and a truly engaging product that combines a slick interface with remarkably broad format support. Perhaps most crucially is Boxee’s very winning social aspect that allows its users to share recommendations and even some video content with their circle of friends. Of course, execution in the software world does not guarantee success in the very different world of hardware, and much of the gadget’s potential will depend on its actual specifications and price point, naturally, but having worked with Avner and his team a bit myself, I am confident that they will produce something that reflects their intense commitment to a great user experience. My guess, without any real inside information, is that the first Boxee box will likely be more of a “proof of concept” device, to get the idea of embedded Boxee out in the world and to provide other manufacturers with a basis to work from for their own product. The truth is that some of the more engaging aspects of the Boxee application on PCs will be difficult to pull off on an inexpensive and lower-powered CE device. My personal preference for this kind of functionality is however to use a small, low power and quiet HTPC. Boxee makes for a great HTPC front end, and with the overall trend towards smaller more efficient PCs like the Atom-powered net-tops, it’s hard for me to envision a standalone Boxee device being better in the end.
I have been looking forward to using it. but how long?