Ruby Washington/The New York Times Boxee draws in a wide variety of video from the Web and presents it in an interface designed for viewing on a TV screen.Roku and Boxee are two radically different companies pursuing the same goal: to bring the wide-ranging world of Internet video to the living room TV.
Roku’s set-top box.In the spirit of Bits’s earlier comparison of Netflix’s Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand, let’s juxtapose the two companies and ask: whose technology and recently announced innovations are more appealing?
For the last year and a half, Roku has been all about a singular focus on movies. The company’s $99 set-top box accesses only movies in the streaming catalog of Netflix (an investor) and, more recently, added films in Amazon’s Video on Demand service. The small black device is easy to connect to your TV and simple to use.
Boxee, on the other hand, is a darling of sophisticated early adopter types. It began life about a year ago as a software program that aggregates a wide range of video from the Internet and also offers tools that allow
third-party developers to pipe in their own content. The company is perhaps best known for trying to add Hulu videos to its buffet and getting repeatedly blocked by the NBC/Fox/ABC
joint venture. Nevertheless, some 700,000 people have downloaded the software to either their computers or Apple TV devices. Many have hooked their laptops running Boxee to their TV sets.
From these disparate
starting points, Boxee and Roku are now converging.
According to a Roku executive who spoke at a conference earlier this week, the company is about to add Roku Channels to its box, bringing in content from Web sites like Blip.TV, Revision 3, TwiT TV and others to its heretofore movie-focused offering. Roku says it will gradually expand the number of channels.
Meanwhile, Boxee will reveal Thursday morning on its blog that the company will partner with an unnamed consumer electronics maker to sell a Boxee set-top box sometime next year. The box, Mr. Ronen said in an interview this week, should sell for around the price of an Apple TV ($200) and will easily connect to television sets,
So, to recap: Roku has offered a closed hardware device with a simple message for mainstream consumers and is now trying to expand to become a more comprehensive platform for Web video.
And Boxee has offered a very open software platform primarily to sophisticated Internet users who want to connect their laptops to their televisions, and is now moving into the brutal competition to convince mainstream consumers to buy hardware.
If this were your TV and you could pick one device, which would you choose?