Boxee

» see boxee.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed boxee. it shipped its public alpha in june 2008, when i was finishing school in ankara, and the boxee box hardware launched in late 2010 in thirty-three countries that did not include turkey at any retail level i could find. the software side was free and worked on linux, so the half-dozen times i poked at media-center software in 2009 to 2011 i fell back to xbmc, the parent project boxee had forked from. that is most of the story for me: boxee existed in english-language tech press and screenshots that looked nicer than xbmc's, then was gone before i ever installed it.

but the english-language tech press cared about it a lot, because for a window of about two years boxee was the most plausible "the desktop is the new tv" pitch on the market. avner ronen ran it out of new york and tel aviv. the build quality was real, the integrations with hulu and netflix were real, and the d-link boxee box hardware was a 200-dollar android-on-a-chip cube with a two-sided remote (qwerty on one face, four buttons on the other). for about eighteen months it looked like the front-runner.

then samsung paid roughly thirty million dollars for the team in july 2013. the boxee servers went dark and the d-link box was bricked for most of its features. the half-million people who had bought one discovered the catch in buying a media center from a startup.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

technically boxee was a wrapper around xbmc that added a content layer: hulu and netflix on top of internet video sources and podcasts. when it worked it was genuinely good. the social layer (you could see what your friends had watched and comment on it) was also five or six years ahead of the eventual smart-tv-app pattern, and was abandoned by samsung along with everything else.

~ the slide ~

two things got boxee. the first was that the network and content owners did not actually want a third-party software layer scraping and re-presenting their content. hulu blocked the boxee desktop client in early 2009, and the on-off licensing dance never stabilized. the rest of the streaming side learned from hulu's resistance. the second was that the smart-tv-built-in app model arrived in 2012 to 2013, and once a samsung tv had a netflix button on its remote there was no reason to plug a 200-dollar box into the hdmi port.

~ the postmortem ~

july 2 2013, samsung announced the acquisition of boxee for around thirty million dollars in cash. the press release said samsung wanted boxee's team and software for its smart-tv platform, which is a sentence that has appeared in approximately every shutdown announcement of the last fifteen years. by the end of 2014 the cloud services that the boxee box depended on were off. d-link offered no replacement firmware. owners who had bought the device for streaming-by-cloud could still use the local-media playback feature, which is to say they had a 200-dollar copy of xbmc on a small chip in their living room.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »