BOB GARFIELD: Earlier this year, a free program called Boxee made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show. Boxee software, still in development, aggregates all the streaming video on the Web and any video on your computer’s hard drive into convenient one-stop access on your computer. Using Boxee and your computer’s remote control, you can flip through movies from your Netflix queue, videos from YouTube and, at least until recently, entire TV shows through Hulu, an online video site that offers programming from NBC, FOX and elsewhere. Boxee isn't a box that connects your computer to your TV, yet, though that’s on the way, but already with a cable or two you could connect your Boxee-equipped computer to the TV - in other words, the long-awaited link from the lean-forward experience of computing to the lean-back world of the couch potato. Paul Smalera, who writes for Slate’s economic website The Big Money, says Boxee so threatens the networks’ monopoly on your sofa that NBC and FOX, the owners of Hulu, told Boxee they could no longer offer their videos.
PAUL SMALERA: The fact that Boxee connects to the television set, it’s taking that video that was only intended to be on the computer monitor and it’s making it, you know, come out on the TV screen. That puts Hulu in direct competition with the cable companies, which are obviously the other main source of revenue for networks like NBC and FOX.
BOB GARFIELD: For a cable company it’s kind of like being shot with your own gun. You've spent 50 years stringing co-ax all around the country, but you’re now selling not just cable programming to consumers, you’re also selling broadband coming in through the same cable, and your consumers are using their broadband service to make their really [LAUGHS] expensive TV service completely unnecessary.
PAUL SMALERA: That’s exactly right. It’s bringing programming, especially in the case of Hulu, that cable has paid good money to the networks for the right to provide, and it’s doing so in a way that robs them of advertising, robs them of, with some early Boxee users, the need to have cable at all.
BOB GARFIELD: On their side, the cable and satellite providers are kind of trying to move in the other direction, to make some of their programming available online. Can you tell me about those attempts and what they bode for all of us?
PAUL SMALERA: Sure, and the biggest one, and I think the most interesting one, is from Comcast, which is the biggest cable company in the United States. They're working on a program they called Comcast OnDemand Online. The idea is that it’s going to be a website where Comcast cable subscribers will be able to go and get to all, or nearly all, of the content that they normally have on their TVs and watch on their computer at their leisure. The thing that doesn't make it competitive with things like Boxee is that it’s only going to be for Comcast subscribers, and there’s a question of relevance, well - will cable subscribers really want to have all that stuff online and, more importantly, will having that content online keep users who might have switched away from cable from doing so?
BOB GARFIELD: As we see companies like NBC Universal and its partner Hulu - and presumably Comcast and the other cable companies - fighting Boxee and its technology, is that a fight that, even in the medium term, that they can win? If there’s a better mousetrap, won't the world beat its path to the door?
PAUL SMALERA: I think so. And I think one of the things that Boxee is doing to stay relevant in that fight is that their plans are to put their program on a set-top box that they're going to sell in stores that will be a direct competitor with the cable box. They're not flouting the law with the way that they're providing the content. They're providing it in a way that cable companies and the networks aren't really fond of, but so far it’s not as if there’s a legal merit where they can have Boxee shut down the way Napster was shut down several years ago.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to pull back for a moment and talk about convergence, the notion that what is on our laptop and maybe on our mobile phone is also on our TVs, and it’s all seamless and intuitive and a natural part of our viewing lives. Where are we in that quest for the convergence Holy Grail?
PAUL SMALERA: Convergence is happening. Boxee’s brought all the computer content onto the TV. I think there’s a natural human tendency that, you know, why should I have to go from one device to the other, depending on what type of individual piece of content I want? Why can't they just all be on the biggest screen in my house, when I'm in my house?
BOB GARFIELD: So, Paul, I've got a very simple question for you. I know you can handle it.
PAUL SMALERA: Okay.
BOB GARFIELD: What’s going to happen?
PAUL SMALERA: [LAUGHS] I need a second to gather myself for that one. I think we're going to see a Boxee box pretty soon, maybe by the end of 2010. TV manufacturers, I should say, are also putting Internet onto their TVs in forms of little widgets, like weather or traffic, Netflix on Demand. So they're not naive to the fact that Internet on TV is something that consumers are going to increasingly demand. Also, laptop makers, I think, aren't going to be naive to that fact either. They have the capability to make 300-dollar laptops that can show Internet video on TVs. And I think you’re going to see cable and the networks do what big media always seems to do, which is to try to protect their interests and take these new developments and technology and apply them in a way that makes business sense for them.
BOB GARFIELD: Paul, thank you very much for joining us.
PAUL SMALERA: Thanks very much, Bob. It was a pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: Paul Smalera is a freelance journalist whose piece, Throwing Voodoo at Hulu, can be found at The Big Money, the online economic site of Slate.
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