OTTCONversations: Andrew Kippen, Boxee - Reinventing Broadcast Television

I caught up with Andrew Kippen, VP of Marketing at Boxee, earlier this year at OTTCON 2012 to talk about the future of television and how Boxee is reinventing broadcast TV. In January 2012, Boxee Inc. released Boxee Live TV, a new product that added live TV content from the big networks: NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS to the Boxee experience. According to Kippen, this $50 add-on solution to the Boxee Box combined the best of everything available Over-the-Top and live broadcast TV. However, since my conversation with Kippen, Boxee discontinued the original Boxee Box it released in November 2010, to make way for a new streamlined $99 Boxee TV box, which was met with strong criticism from both Boxee users and technology blogs like Streamingmedia.com and Popular Science.



The new Boxee TV includes an an antenna to pick up live HD channels and added a subscription-based cloud DVR with "no limits" and built-in Internet apps like Netflix, VUDU, YouTube, Vimeo and Pandora. Boxee also struck a deal with Walmart to sell the new Boxee TV device direct to consumers in time for the holidays. Kippen says that Boxee's major consumer markets are the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and is available in 35 countries, giving it a much broader footprint than other companies in the space.

In his recent article, Tim Siglin points out, that two main features of the new Boxee TV aren't even available in all markets.

"For the company to avoid disappointing customers again, it would make sense to have the most important features -- the USP, or unique selling proposition -- ready to go at product launch. Yet, the two primary features still aren't available, almost a month after launch: live television pause and cloud- or network-based DVR (nDVR). Those two features, which the company touts as part and parcel of the "Boxee Rebellion" on its packaging, are not ready for widespread use. In fact, the nDVR functionality that Boxee calls unlimited DVR is only available in beta in eight cities in the United States: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C." 

Siglin added that there's also a mismatch in the Boxee-Walmart retail strategy, because Walmart has a limited presence in many of those urban markets and faces a big hurdle to sell to sell the Boxee TV to its rural markets, where the unlimited DVR service is not yet available.

Although, the Boxee TV blog states that:

"As we begin service in these markets we assume there’s going to a few growing pains so we’re marking the service as BETA, but most users should have full functionality (and it will be FREE during this period)." 

While Boxee continues to innovate its product and strike deals with content providers, many of its early adopters have expressed their frustration at being abandoned. The company started with an agnostic business model and a free software-based OTT social media center and devoted user community, but has phased out the software platform, and locked out popular features and development as the Boxee platform matured over the last few years.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen wrote on the Boxee blog:

"Our small team has poured our hearts and souls into the Boxee Box and it has been great to meet users from all over the globe. Some loved it, some wanted more features, others complained, but everyone was passionate.  We hope you have enjoyed it and will continue to use it in your living rooms, dens, bedrooms or wherever else you set it up."

Kippen says that Boxee's focus has been to extend the feature set, streamline what they do to make it simpler and easier to use, and bring in as much content as they can. He says that the company has always seen Boxee as an ecosystem play.

"We want to be the experience that you have on your TV, on your mobile device, your tablet," Kippen says. "We could be on a set-top box, Blu-Ray player or game console. We really see Boxee as a great way to access all that content that's coming from the Internet, and now from your antenna or cable system. We do a great job of bringing that all into one place. So I think for us, we would really like to see Boxee in a lot of those different devices, and also powering more innovative experiences between different screens." 

According to Kippen, it all comes back to storytelling, which has grown beyond the traditional linear narrative into a transmedia experience.

"How do we take storytelling to the next level to where it's more than just a TV show, more than just a website or an iPad app," asks Kippen. "How do we create a story arc that goes across all these different platforms?"

Kippen is confident that Boxee can be a great way to experiment and build those experiences out.


About Boxee
Boxee Inc. is helping people fall in love with TV all over again. We believe TV should be personal and delivered on your schedule. That’s why we created the world’s first cloud DVR that allows you to record an unlimited amount of TV programs to the Internet, and then watch on your TV, computer, iPad…pretty much anywhere. Boxee also lets you watch shows from broadcast TV channels and shows & movies from online services like Netflix, VUDU and YouTube. Boxee is made with love in NYC.

Boxee Beta and Boxee Box Debut at CES 2010, NewTeeVee Live Interview with Avner Ronen

After much build up over the last few months, Boxee Beta and the Boxee Box made their official debut at CES 2010 this week. I spoke with Boxee CEO, Avner Ronen, at NewTeeVee Live 2009 who was there to announce the upcoming release of Boxee beta and the Boxee Box. Boxee made NewTeeVee's Next Big Thing List in 2009 of promising new players in the online video space and Avner discussed the continued maturation of their platform and the online video space. The popular free OTT "social" media center platform celebrated the milestone release of their newest Boxee Beta software version with a preview of it on December 7, 2009, and the much anticipated Boxee Box was unveiled at CES 2010 this past week.

The Boxee Box embeds the cross-platform open source software in the hardware box and joins the growing ranks of OTT solutions that bring internet video into the living room. Boxee is based on the xbmc open-source project and has been in alpha since early 2007, receiving $6M in Series A funding in November 2008 and $4 Series B funding in August 2009.

Criticism has been raised, on how Boxee is going to make money with their agnostic business model, but right now Boxee is more focused on improving the user experience. Boxee's 2009 revenue goal was $0 dollars, and Avner joked, that they made that stretch goal.

He said,

"2010 for us is not be about revenues or improving the business model or validating the business model, it's going to still be about improving product, getting distribution onto more CE devices and getting content onto the platform while we improve the user experience."

Avner noted though, that for Boxee to be successful, content owners need to be successful through models that they can monetize their content, and Boxee will be working on ways to build value for their partners in 2010. The much public dispute with Hulu last year ended with Hulu blocking Boxee's access to their public RSS feeds, but just this week they announced partnerships with TV.com, Blip.tv and gaming network IGN.

"I think TV everywhere is definitely exciting because I think it's going to be one of those things that are going to push more and more content online - and the numbers are that less than 10% of cable conent is online and about 50% of broadcast is online, and only 2% of video viewed is online - and those are all numbers we should see growing."

The early release in 2010 of Boxee's beta software and first hardware device is both an exciting and disruptive development for both the company, the user community and the online video industry.

On the Boxee blog, Avner noted,

"Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations... Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room."

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Read more on the Boxee Blog

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Qik Highlights from the San Francisco Brightcove Alliance Meetup

I attended the Brightcove Alliance meetup last week on September 10th in San Francisco at the Thirsty Bear brew pub which highlighted the announcement of major expansion of the company's global partner program that includes more than 200 technology, distribution and solution providers. Brightcove's founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, was joined by Brightcove Alliance partners from the Bay Area for an evening of networking, brainstorming, and demos that showed how leading media companies and marketers are taking advantage of their partner ecosystem to deliver powerful and innovative solutions built on top of the Brightcove online video platform.

The event turned out to be a "who's who in online video" with local Bay Area companies TubeMogul, TurnHere, Qik, Cooliris, Apture and many more in attendance. It was a great see so many people I both knew and meet new friends from my online communities. I recorded the demos with my Flip MinoHD while doing a live mobile broadcast using my Nokia N95 and Qik, one of the companies at the meetup as part of the Brightcove Alliance. I'll be posting in-depth coverage of the event and September 11th announcement, Brightcove Accelerates Expansion of Global Partner Ecosystem. I collected my Qik videos from the meetup which include a brief introduction by Jeremy and short demos by Cooliris and Qik. Other demos were by Apture and Boxee which I'll share in a later post. Just a few days prior to the meetup, Brightcove announced a partnership with Boxee to provide Brightcove media customers turn-key video distribution options to the living room television via Boxee's interface. I admit that the Qik videos are low quality and I'll post higher quality versions I shot with my Flip MinoHD in a later post.

In this video, Jeremy Allaire, of Brightcove kicks off the meetup with a brief presentation of the expansion of their partner program.

In the video, Brightcove Alliance partner Cooliris demos it's innovative plug-in that transforms your browser into an infinite "3D Wall" of content that you can scroll through rather than click through to enjoy photos and videos from the Web or your desktop.



In the following video, Ramu Sunkara, CEO and Co-Founder of Qik and members of his team demo their new capability to stream live video from their mobile handsets to the Brighcove player.




While this demo and the others were hampered by the poor broadband connection at the at the local venue -- that didn't stop the speakers who were each prepared with back up presentations that highlighted the creativity and innovation of the Brightcove Alliance and it's online video ecosystem.

Daisy Whitney's New Media Minute: The Five Online Video Companies to Watch in 2009

As 2008 draws to a close the predictions for 2009 are in full swing. In this episode of the New Media Minute Daisy Whitney highlights five online video companies to watch in 2009. They are entertainment studio and content site MyDamnChannel.com, new media measurement service Quantcast, open source technology firm Kaltura, how-to video site 5min and free, open-source software platform Boxee.tv.




My Damn Channel launched in 2007 by Former MTV exec Rob Barnet as an entertainment studio and new media platform created to empower artists to co-produce, distribute and monetize original, episodic video content. Similar to Funny Or Die they have signed up high-profile creators and content curators to produce smart and funny videos from the best comedians, actors and musicians. Notable channels include the viral phenomenon "You Suck At Photoshop," (created by three-time Webby winner Big Fat Brain) and the evil, comic soap opera "Horrible People" (created by A.D. Miles). Last month they announced a distribution deal with Atom.com creating MyDamnChannel.Atom.com.

Read more at Tilzy.TV » Atom and My Damn Channel Announce Distribution Partnership.


Mediaweek recently reported that Quantcast was heating up the online video metrics space signing deals with ABC, Hulu and BBE (formerly Broadband Enterprises) to provide them all with comprehensive audience viewing metrics. Writer Mike Shields said that, "Some publishers and agency executives predicted the Quantcast coup would force incumbents Nielsen Online and comScore to speed up their own video measurement efforts." He spoke with several CEOs of online video companies who conveyed that Quantcast moved quickly to fill the void needed to provide overnight ratings like you'd get with TV spots.

According to Sam Baltrusis of Contentinople, "Quantcast, which launched in late 2006, boasts 85,000 publishers now participating in its Quantified Publisher program, directly measuring more than 10 million unique Web destinations, including Websites, videos, widgets, and games. It's clear that comScore Inc. won't take Quantcast's offensive sitting down, though. The company has accused Quantcast of using less reliable measurement tools, posting a blog response to Quantcast's numbers"

Besides Quantcast, both TubeMogul and Visible Measures have been developing innovative tools for robust reporting metrics for online video. More on Quantcast on Crunchbase.

Kaltura just released version 1.0 of its "All in One” video module for Drupal. According to the press release, "With more than 15,000 sites already using our solutions and hundreds of new ones every day, it is clear that our open source platform is filling a void in the online video space" said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman and CEO. "The Kaltura Drupal module is the perfect solution for integrators and site builders to easily add advanced integrated rich media functionality to their sites. It is also another great example of how our open source development platform can be used by the community to create integrated rich media extensions for other platforms. We invite providers of other platforms to add to our arsenal of open source video solutions, including extensions for MediaWiki, WordPress, and Drupal, and build their own rich media extensions using our flexible, available, and free development tools.”

More about Kaltura on Crunchbase.


How-to site 5min describe their online video start-up as a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge. Their goal is "to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides in areas such as arts, business, fashion, sports, health, tech, food, and much more." Israeli start-up now based in New York raised $5 million earlier this year from Spark Capital and has expanded beyond being a destination site by introducing a new Smart Player that can handle text, video, and images in an embeddable widget and by launching a semantic syndication platform called Videoseed to deliver videos to partner web sites Answers.com and wikiHow.com through semantic search.

From Adweek earlier this month , "5min has in recent months signed syndication deals with sites reaching more than 110 million unique users. Via its VideoSeed platform, it can provide its how-to video content by semantically matching it to relevant, on-topic partner sites and offer it up via its proprietary SmartPlayer. Unlike YouTube and others, the company tags videos and provides metadata itself rather than leaving such tasks to users." 5min Enters Distribution Game by Georg Szalai, THR.com.

Competitors in the How-to space include DIY Network, Expert Village, Instructables, Graspr, Howcast, VideoJug and Wonder HowTo.

More about 5min on Crunchbase.


Boxee is free open source cross-platform social media center software and entertainment hub that runs on a PC or Apple TV and lets users manage their local or online content. At it's core it's an XBMC (formerly named "XBox Media Center") fork in a custom skin with social networking features that integrates content from local drives or from popular Internet destination sites like Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, YouTube, Blip.tv, and Revision3 and Flickr all in an easy-to-use remote control interface. It's received rave reviews and won $50,000 in October at the i-stage competition and a free booth at at CES.

Boxee has been in a closed alpha but is opening a release of Mac and Ubuntu (Linux-based operating system) to everyone on the Jan 8th. They also plan to release their own set-top box in 2009.

This video explains how cool Boxee really is.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

The Boxee wikipedia page has a lot good background information.