Boxee: WebTV That Makes Sense. Is That Good or Bad for Big Cable?
All Things Digital by Peter Kafka, January 13, 2009
No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”
Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.
The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.
It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?
