By the pricking of my thumbs, something awesome this way comes.
It's the first press event at CES and time to tease you before our big announcement on the 7th so here's a sneak peek of something about the Boxee Box that we didn't show off at the Boxee Beta Event in December.
Context & Ripple Effects
Boxee's path to this stage runs through the living-room-hack era: it started as XBMC-derived software running on Apple TV, built a following that prompted GigaOM's 'Why Does Everyone Heart Boxee?' profile, then formalized third-party development with its app developer challenge in mid-2009. By the December Beta Event it was a desktop application with an ecosystem, but no device of its own.
This teaser matters because it points at the missing piece: a dedicated Boxee Box, teased here ahead of a confirmed January 7th CES press event, converting a software community into a hardware product. Engadget picked up the news the same day, signaling the announcement had traction beyond Boxee's own blog audience.
First-order effects
- A dedicated Boxee Box takes the software out of the hacked-Apple-TV-and-PC niche and puts a branded set-top in front of mainstream buyers at CES.
- The January 7th press event forces Boxee to show the full product — design, features, and presumably pricing — rather than iterate in private betas as it has so far.
Second-order effects
- Established streaming set-top makers face a competitor whose differentiator is an open app ecosystem seeded by the developer challenge, pushing them to match on applications rather than just codec support.
- Content partners gain another licensed endpoint: a purpose-built box makes negotiating distribution deals with Boxee more attractive than deals tied to jailbroken devices.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, media-center software projects follow the route XBMC descendants have been taking — from enthusiast hacks toward licensed consumer hardware with app-store economics, shifting the set-top market from closed boxes to platforms.
- CES continues its role as the launch venue where software communities announce their transformation into hardware companies, raising the bar for what a startup must bring to the show floor.
The trend: Hobbyist media-center software is crossing over into licensed consumer hardware, with open app ecosystems as the wedge against closed set-tops.