Can Boxee’s Web Software Interest The Masses?
May 14, 2009 by tcgames
Like many people who own a PC, Avner Ronen found himself watching more and more video online. But he wanted to view it on the TV in his living room as well as on his laptop. "I got together with a bunch of my friends and we realized we were watching streaming video on the Web a lot more and using our TVs a lot less," Ronen says.
But they couldn’t find technology that did a good job of bridging the gap between the PC in the home office and the TV in the living room. So they created the software themselves. "We just wanted to build something that we would use," says Ronen, who emigrated to the U.S. from Israel in 1999.
The result is Boxee TV, software that grabs video and music downloaded onto a PC and then houses it in a single, easy-to-navigate location. It also lets users pull together content from a range of online video and music sources, from CBS’s CBS.com and Last.fm to Viacom’s Comedy Central and Time Warner’s CNN. Better still, when the PC is connected to a TV set with a cable that can be had for $10, Boxee lets users enjoy programming on a big TV that they’d otherwise view on an often-tiny computer screen. Ronen says 80 percent of users make the connection between their PCs and TVs.
Boxee was first released in mid-2008 to users of Apple Macintosh computers and machines running the Linux operating system. Already the software has developed a large, devoted following of almost a half million users. At the same time, Ronen and his pals have sprinted past where tech companies large and small have sputtered for the better part of a decade. For instance, Microsoft created the Media Center PC concept in 2002;…
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