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Thinking inside the Boxee
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Boxee boasts a sleek interface for web on TV. Source: lifehacker.
Further pushing TV and web down the aisle of media-consumption marriage is Boxee, a cross-platform media center adapted from the open source application XBMC (or Xbox Media Center). Free for download at boxee.tv (Macs and Linux computers and Apple TVs only; Windows PC is being tested right now), Boxee lets users not only access their fave photos, videos and music from their hard drives onto the tube, but also their favorite shows, video clips, and music from the web via sites like Last.fm, YouTube, CNN.com and Hulu to name a few. Its sleek organization and design surpasses jumbled cable and satellite TV menus. Oh, and then there’s the social networking aspect of it all: Boxee users create a profile through which they can grade content and make recommendations to friends about what to watch/check out/etc.
So does this mean the death of TV as we know it? Boxee execs may not put it that way but they are giving tube-runners a run for their money. As founder and CEO Avner Ronen told the New York Times recently, “The challenge for the cable industry is how they grapple with the fact that this is in some way a substitution for some of the things they do.”
But Boxee also has to grapple with the fact that the business model they are working under does not exist yet. Boxee has yet to come out with its own version of Apple TV-like hardware (something it says it will do this year) and would be wise to look to current industry behemoths for guidance. The only problem with that is those same industry giants have yet to make significant inroads at creating elegant, one-stop web-TV interfaces – in other words, they’ve been slow at creating their own “Boxees” and making money off of them just yet.
And there’s no sign of the old-fashioned way of consuming TV necessarily going out of fashion soon: one need look no further than the digital TV transition problems going on right now to be reminded that there are still some of us watching re-runs of “Friends” with ye olde bunny ears and tin foil. I imagine the mandatory merging of Internet and TV is still a few decades off (but, you know just a few).
Despite its accolades and its during-and-post-CES buzz, above all Boxee represents to me the changing direction of tube consumption. TV has, traditionally, been a passive pastime and one that I can thoroughly enjoy looking as amorphous as possible (read: wearing sweats; eating something consumable without the use of utensils). Platforms like Boxee are changing that to one that is interactive but I can only wonder if this – albeit inevitable – trajectory is necessarily a good one for those of us who’ve never lamented the inability to update Twitter through a remote control. I’m not against it by any means – indeed Boxee looks great and deserves the praise it is garnering, and I’m sure tech/web TV (notice the lack of hyphen!) junkies are overjoyed about being able to watch revision3 on, well, an actual TV. I’m just preemptively nostalgic about the fact that watching the brain-draining boob tube may now actually involve using my brain, if even just a little bit.
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