There’s Something About Boxee

Courtesy of Avner Ronen Avner Ronen, the founder of Boxee, spoke earlier this week at a Boxee meet-up event in New York City.

Boxee, a free software package that pulls together multiple sources of Internet video in an easy-to-use interface, has quietly been building an army of ardent fans.

But what is it about Boxee that is driving the technorati wild?

Turns out, more than a handful of the 600 or so people who filed into Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday evening for a free Boxee-focused event couldn’t quite put their finger on it either.

In fact, a number of them weren’t exactly sure what Boxee was.

Aarin Clemons, who won a Mac mini computer by performing a beatboxed song incorporating Boxee’s name during a talent show portion of the evening, confessed he’d never used the service. “My friends brought me here,” he said.

Vincent Polidoro, a 25-year-old filmmaker in New York who persuaded Mr. Clemons to attend the gathering, said he had recently joined the ranks of those who adore the service, which many people use to pipe video from a computer to a TV screen.

“It’s nice to have an alternative way to get content,” he said. “I’m sick of being married to Comcast or some other service provider.” Attending the Boxee event, he said, reinforced the idea that “the Internet is our medium and finally, here is a service that gets how we want to use it.”

Looking around the room and seeing his peers, he said, made him like the service even more.

Tom Conrad, chief technology officer at Pandora, the streaming music service, said he was amazed at the turnout and by the makeup of the audience, which he said seemed fairly mainstream. This could indicate a larger shift in the way audiences are consuming entertainment: “Just the fact alone that 80 percent of Boxee users have it connected to their television, that stat alone amazes me,” he said.

Avner Ronen, the 33-year-old founder and chief executive of Boxee, attributed its popularity to the company’s honesty and openness with its fan base. “We have been very open with our users, even about the bad stuff,” he said.

As one attendee put it, Mr. Ronen has become a rock star thanks to his highly publicized scuffles with better-known figures and organizations like Mark Cuban and the big-media video site Hulu. He’s winning fans and evangelists among the tech-savvy for sticking to the values that they themselves favor and prefer. That can go a long way toward wooing tech influentials.

Andrew Kippen, a spokesman for Boxee who helped coordinate the New York gathering, said he was astonished by the response to the event. An earlier Boxee-themed evening in San Francisco attracted 125 people, Mr. Kippen said, even though it was promoted in the same manner: through Boxee’s blog and Twitter.

Boxee also used Tuesday’s event to unveil a few announcements about the service: The company revamped its API for third-party developers, and announced partnerships with RadioTime, PBS and Pandora to provide their content on the software platform. In addition, the get-together featured brief presentations from some of the company’s content partners, including Blip.tv and NextNewNetworks. Whitney Hess, a consultant for Boxee, who has been surveying testers of the service, revealed some of the changes the company would be making in its next version. High on the list were tighter controls over notifications and filters for sexually explicit content.

But one thing Mr. Ronen made sure to emphasize at the close of the event was that the company wanted to keep the software free for users. When an audience member asked how the company planned to generate revenue, he said it was considering a subscription model for some content, similar to the system Netflix uses, or borrowing from the model of Apple’s iTunes store, allowing content owners to sell their content through Boxee.

Boxee itself will always stay free for users, he said, adding: “Read my lips.”