In the NewTeeVee Live conference held in San Francisco last week, Avner Ronen, Boxee’s CEO, announced that the company is planning to unveil its new hardware product, the Boxee set up box slated for release in 2010. According to a recent post on the company’s blog, the product was enabled through a partnership with a consumer electronics company he met at CES. Details on the partner company remain secret:
I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.
The dedicated Boxee device will make it easy for users to consume and find content, no matter what source. The product will be competing with devices like Roku and Vudu, but the company is working on integrating its open-source media center in other living-room devices: game consoles, BlueRay players, etc. As stated in a recent blog post: “Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room.”
Specs and mocks of the Boxee Beta will be presented in on December 7th in an event in Brooklyn, NY (RSVP HERE). In addition to the product announcement, Avner offered the following predictions for TV Everywhere by 2015 :
- The biggest Internet show is going to be bigger than the biggest TV show in terms of overall business
- More Apple subscribers for video content than Comcast subscribers
- People will watch more videos and will pay more money for them
Watch the video:
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
