Digitalwerks

It’s been an incredible time for the boxee team, coming off their triumphant CES showing.  They also just got a very favorable article in the NYTimes.  From my own experience working with them in Las Vegas, I can attest to the fact that there were many, many people eager to partner with boxee, some of them representing consumer electronics hardware manufacturers.

So, it’s not very surprising that boxee’s CEO Avner recently threw open the question of whether or not his team should pursue a hardware solution for the boxee software.  Currently the software only runs on Linux and Mac computers and AppleTV’s (although in a somewhat crippled mode because of the specific configuration of that device).  Clearly, that is a relatively limited demographic and to expand boxee needs to get on more hardware, whether it will be PC’s (the Windows version is expected soon) or on stand alone devices, of which there are many currently, including Popcorn Hour, Mvix, Western Digital, Netgear, Neuros, Roku et al.  None of them has been overly successful, and most industry observers think that there is little mainstream interest is such media extenders.  As has been demonstrated by the failure of the AppleTV to really take off, somewhat ironically for boxee.  

Extended functionality such as playing back local/networked content in a variety of codecs and containers, or streaming Internet video is still somewhat computationally complex, at least to do so in an attractive and user-friendly manner as boxee currently does.  And that means it requires a beefier chip or CPU than exists in any of the currently available media boxes, in fact many of them off-load a good deal of the decoding and/or menu generation to a PC, like the DivX Connected solution does.  But again, that has not proven popular, particularly outside of the bleeding edge early adopter crowd.

My opinion is that boxee should just ignore hardware for now.  All the things that make boxee unique, such as its complete openness and the very cool social networking features would probably be the exact things that would have to be cut in order for it to work on a low cost standalone device.  But more crucially, the unique promise of boxee rests entirely in its singular focus on the user.  Flexibile, customizable, responsive to a committed user community, and Open Source to the core, those are the terms that apply to boxee and essentially to no other comparable solution available today.  The truth at the heart of boxee is that no company could possibly stay ahead or even current with all the needs or desires of its users.  There is no way even the best, most intelligent, or largest team of developers could predict all the sources of content that I explore on a daily basis, much less do the same for thousands or millions of other users.  And that’s why boxee fundamentally works best as a software application on top of a general purpose computer, regardless of operating system.  Increasingly powerful console gaming systems are a different story, as a PS3 running boxee would be pretty cool, and somewhat funny considering the XBMC-roots of boxee, but it’s unclear how feasible that is right now.

In addition, having met and spent time with the boxee team, clearly their strengths are really in software.  That’s not to say they couldn’t do hardware well too, it’s just that they embody the small-h hacker mentality, fired more by the challenge of solving problems than by making things polished and perfect.  One of them told me, semi-jokingly to be sure, that boxee was becoming almost too corporate and not innovative enough for him already.  boxee currently has 11 employees.  ;)  They should stick to what they are doing now, and doing better than anybody else out there.