announcing the boxee app dev challenge
the new boxee API enables developers to build and publish apps for boxee users. while people are working on a variety of boxee apps, we thought it would be a good idea to provide some extra incentive for the developers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Boxee's arc so far runs from hack to platform candidate: it began as xbmc/boxee running on Apple TV in October 2008, and by February 2009 had earned enough enthusiast goodwill that GigaOM was asking why everyone hearts Boxee. A March 2009 company post on the trials and tribulations of innovation signaled the growing pains of riding that attention.
The May 5 announcement converts that momentum into a developer program: a public API plus an app dev challenge that pays builders to publish apps for Boxee users. It matters because Boxee is small relative to the hardware platforms it runs on, and third-party apps are its cheapest way to widen the catalog without licensing every source itself.
First-order effects
- Developers now get both the tooling (the new Boxee API) and a financial incentive via the challenge to build and publish apps directly to Boxee's installed base.
- Boxee shifts part of its product roadmap to outside contributors, letting the app catalog grow at the pace of community effort rather than in-house engineering.
Second-order effects
- Content and service owners gain a new distribution surface on the television through third-party-built apps, which pressures them to decide whether to embrace or restrict Boxee access — the tension already visible in the company's own account of its innovation struggles.
- Rival media-center and connected-TV platforms face pressure to match the openness with their own developer APIs rather than keeping their ecosystems closed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, living-room software converges on the mobile playbook: a platform owner curating distribution while third-party developers supply the apps, making the developer relationship — not the device — the competitive asset.
The trend: TV and media-center software is adopting the third-party app-platform model pioneered on phones, with developer incentives replacing exclusive content deals as the way to grow a catalog.