Boxee and the future of the television

From: Boxee Generates Buzz by the NYTimes.com

Boxee is betting that consumers accustomed to the freedom of the Internet will not be interested in a dribble of online services on their televisions but will want more comprehensive access to Web video.

“Consumers and developers aren’t going to put up with the idea of one piece of hardware talking to only a few services,” said Bijan Sabet, a partner at Spark Capital, one of two East Coast venture capital firms that invested a total of $4 million in Boxee last year. “It would be like getting a Verizon phone you can only use to call other Verizon subscribers. It’s not a natural thing.”

Boxee appears to be generating a tremendous amount of buzz. For good reason too.

The people behind Boxee appear to "get it", as is evident by the above quote.

In a world where anyone has access to anything via the internet the game has changed for television and media as well.

It's no longer enough to have some or "most" of media on your TV.

It's no longer enough to have access to some prepackaged set of channels from a cable provider.

It's no longer enough to have access to the popular stuff... or the stuff in english.. or the stuff on youtube.

The television of the future will be able to play any video from anywhere in the world through the internet.

Everyone will have equal access to not only watch but also to publish and share media with everyone else in the world.

No longer will what's on TV be constrained by a cable company like Comcast, a hardware company like Apple, or even the latest greatest kid on the block, Youtube.

The TV of the future must be completely content, language and geography agnostic.

If you want to watch the first landing on the moon... videos from China in a local dialect... a video your sister posted yesterday of her kids making a snowman... you should and you will be able to watch it on your TV.

Wether this content be personal home movies, niche content of any type in any part of the world or any language, or mainstream popular media, whatever your hearts content you should and one day you will be able to watch it on your TV with simply the flip of a button on the remote.

That is the big picture, and until now there has not been any one piece of software or one company that could get you there.

With youtube and a thousand other existing web services are serving every type of content imaginable around the world,

with high-speed bandwidth becoming more ubiquitous everyday,

and finally with the revolutionary bittorrent protocol allowing anyone with even a shred of bandwidth to serve a video to millions...

...the media world is at the cusp of making two more great leaps.

One leap for media will be mobile.

The other leap will be to the living room.

For the next step in revolutionizing media we need piece of software that is Mosaic or Firefox of the internet for media for the TV.

Boxee is the first thing I've seen that *may* very well fit that bill.

Ubuntu 8.04 now in beta

Ubuntu 8.04, aka Hardy Heron is now into beta. I've been running it since it was in it's early alpha releases on my intel desktop machine. I'm getting so excited about how good it's getting. Let's face it. Running Ubuntu is just plain fun.

The future is open, Verizon to support any device or app on it's network?

Some people may overlook the importance of this.

Verizon opens up, will support any device, any app on its network

However, the end-to-end (aka. common carrier, aka. network neutrality) principal of the Internet is slowly taking over how other networks operate as well.

These networks are increasingly finding themselves *competing* with the Internet and they cannot do so without opening themselves up and creating a level playing field for innovators as well. You can see it with cellular networks (competing with wifi & the infinite array of internet services), traditional telephony (competing with VOIP), and to some degree cable TV, which is now competing in a very direct way for the attention of younger generations.

What this eventually means for Verizon customers is:

• Good bye having to *rent* the GPS features on your phone.


• Good bye ridiculous 10 cent text messages.


• Good bye paying $2.99 for ring tones.


• Good by buy or rent stupid applications like "weather" on your sell phone.


• Good bye having to pay $10 a month extra just to be able to blog photos from your camera capable phone.


• Good by having to choose a cell phone based the scant choices your cellular company provided.

What this means is in the long run a veritable cornucopia of services will be available to you on your phone, whatever entrepreneurs or anyone else can dream up, and all you'll have to pay Verizon for is the bandwidth you use.

What Verizon looses off charging service fees for few obtuse services they will MORE than make up for selling bandwidth for the 100,000's of thousand mobile services that will increase the utility, use and validity of their network.

Verizon no longer gets to tax based on the contents of the package or the type of service. Unlike the cable companies they no longer get to pick which content makers get to use their network.

They're now pledging to be a "carrier neutral" shipping company for bits. This throwing away of arbitrary and frankly stupid criteria can now mean innovation can really happen. Verizon will no longer arbitrate the winners and losers instead the playing field will be open to ALL comers. All, specifically meaning anyone who has access to the Internet or a cell phone. This means potentially billions of users can use or offer services or benefit from services on their network instead of the few dozen services Verizon offers its customers now.

It is funny to watch how the cellular provider "tax" on items like the absurdly overpriced 10 cent text message and other capabilities of cell phones have shifted and distorted innovation which has routed itself around them.

This taxing has been going on, and will still continue to go on for a while, but with Verizon declaring its cellular network neutral, the apple iPhone challenging traditional rules set down by cellular carriers and above all Google throwing down the gauntlet in helping create an open source mobile OS the paradigm for these closed networks like cable, cellular, and traditional telephony seem to be opening up.

The future is open.



Related article: Apple to Unveil Faster IPhone, AT&T's Stephenson Says - Bloomberg.com

Ramblings on Viddler's time based commenting and tagging and on what makes Mozilla kick so much a**.

Originally posted as a comment to FactoryJoe, Thoughts on Mozilla. I more or less posted here for archival reasons, but if you find it interesting feel free to comment. Disclaimer, this is a comment, I did not proof read it or even spell check it. You've been forwarned. :)

Re: FactoryJoe, Thoughts on Mozilla

Just checking out the viddler interface.

Viddler’s time based tagging and commenting is interesting but let me know when they get the comments out of flash and use the blog API (blogger.com, moveabletype, wordpress) to post them as "real comments" to your blog post where they belong… where they can be read with the rest of the comments, where they can be tracked with co.mments.com and other trackers, where they can be syndicated with RSS… where I can actually READ them instead of them being in a tiny little 320×240 little window.

The bottom line is there’s two different conversations here. There’s the one in viddler, which is… whatever… can’t follow it. And then there’s the one in the page… which is awesome and useful…. and I can actually read… and which I will actually get responses on because I’m tracking it with co.comments.com.

Now… as to comment on what I read and hear here [on the original blog post].

Mozilla is a PLATFORM… this is why it rocks and [Microsoft] IE SUCKS. Because mozilla is open source, it can be extended… innovation can happen… Greasemonkey, plugins… exetentions… to a lesser extent themes. You’re right, most people DON’T care what browser they use, but if that was the ONLY case then Mozilla would be DEAD and has no future. Mozilla’s job is to MAKE people care! There’s NO way around that. In order for mozilla to succeed people MUST care. Mozilla’s success right now is because they ARE making people care. My DAD uses mozilla. My dad would never go back to IE. Why? Because of security and popups for one. And btw, he see’s that as the same issue. Because in many ways it is. IE craps all over him.

Extentions he’s installed = 0. Theme’s he’s changed to or installed = 0.

Why do I say this. Because just like Apple who buys or simply outright steals the best 3rd party OS innovations and hacks like quicksilver, and the current application switcher and tons of other innovations. Mozilla needs to roll the BEST of these innovations, the most popular, the most sought after into the DEFAULT mozilla. Because Mozilla CAN and IS winning at making a large part of the population CARE about their browser. Security, pop up ad blocking… maybe a few other key components… but people WILL NOT configure mozilla… they will not sift through it’s endless preference panes no matter how well designed and simple they are… **intelligent defaults are extremely important** and even more important still they will NOT go through and install plugins. The best of breed plugins need to be integrated into the core mozilla. It’s good for the developers of those plugins to aknowlege their hard work and integrate it into the core… and it’s GREAT for the customers. That cycle of encouraging innovation through creating an OPEN PLATFORM… I’m thinking grease monkey too… by courting the developers… by making great API’s… by using copy left open source licensing to encourage branching. That and lots of consultants and strategists and developers donating their time and energy is the key to mozilla creating a product that’s so much better than Microsoft IE that people CARE to install it.

[read: If it's not good enough to be included and configured properly in the default install for Joe User, then it isn't worth installing.]

Personally, I have infinite thanks for Mozilla. If you set a side the fact that I use firefox and love it… take that completely out of the equation all together… mozilla has still been a RESOUNDing success. Even if it only had 15% of the market share… and not the 20 or 25% it has… even if it never progresses beyond 20% it’s still a success because it has brought innovation and openess back to the web space. Of course… to most people commenting here they’re like “no sh*t, you don’t say”.. but I had to say it. Even though I would hope Mozilla would take 50% market share or more and make I.E. the #2 browser it really doesn’t matter in the scope of things. All that matters to me now is that the mozilla foundation turns a 10% or 20% PROFIT while staying true to it’s manifest (being open and not evil) and keep innovating so that it can sustain itself as a very equitable business and keep innovation alive in the space for another 5, 10, 20 years.

Anyway… just thought I really just wanted to comment on viddler, because I was checking it out, but I thought since I wrote so much on viddler interface I should also respond to the actual post.

One last thought on viddler. While the interface is interesting there’s a lot more to a company than a cool flash interface… look at blip.tv. My fav video blog host. The key to blip’s success thus far is serving the core videoblogging community… which unlike youtube.. wants to have their own domain… their own blog, the ability to monetize… to OWN their own content and have control over it… to not have it deleted or removed because of some arbitrary DMCA notice. Anyway… none of that has to do with a slick interface. It has to do with strategy and architecutre and business direction. Then again.. blip could REALLY stand to have a slick viddler flash interface… maybe the two should partner… of course maybe viddler sees blip as competition. They shouldn’t, but maybe they do.

Why Microsoft is dead

Paul Graham's article "Microsoft is Dead" on why Microsoft's relevance in the computing world has radically declined is a gut check on how far we've come in the last few years.

Microsoft is no longer a threat to competition and progress not only because of increased competition from linux and apple, but primarily because the desktop is no longer the most important platform.

As gmail and other web services have proven the web and the web browser are the new platform. So called "office 2.0" has taken over. Gmail is the new Outlook, wiki's are the new Microsoft Word, and various other services like Upcoming.org and a whole lot more have put a severe dent in Microsoft's control with the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

Computing has also moved beyond the desktop with cell phones and mobile computing and media has taken a bigger role and microsoft is completely failing to get a handle on media, see it's failure with the zune, Play's for sure drm, right up to Vista which is frighteningly anti-consumer... and ironically all this would appear to be wasted as per the EMI and Apple announcement to sell non-drm media... though admitedly the video market and new technology like HDTV, Blueray, and HDDVD have yet to play out.

The biggest realization of this for me came when I was chatting with a friend via IM and I called twitter "cross platform". No longer does cross plaform necissarily mean Mac, Win and Linux. It now means many things and among them cross platform can mean the world wide web and the mobile web.

The operating system has lost some of it's relevance, which is why I can happily write this blog post from a computer running Ubuntu... because the majority of my primary applications are either open source like Firefox or web based like Gmail.

The big question is... is this the end of the tyranny or are we just swapping on tyrant for another. Clearly google is the leader in the new economy trailed closely by yahoo, while they have seen their share of critics neither exercises the dominance or control Microsoft once held.