Money makes the content go ‘round…

fred-wilson:

“Users want to see more content on Boxee. Content owners want to be paid for what they produce (whether that’s TV Shows, movies, music, or applications). We don’t believe these are conflicting interests.”

—

Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments

Content rights have always been the thing holding back the next generation of content delivery.  Here’s to hoping content owners overcome their self-serving biases and price their wares (for now) at a mutually agreeable level, even if it’s not the most profitable.  In the long-run, teaching everyone the habit of paying for content online is more valuable than collecting relatively large payments from a few early adopters (and pissing off everyone else in the process).

Try Boxee. Now.

I want to encourage all (one) of you to check out Boxee.  I’ve been a fan of digital home theater software since XBMC (which is what Boxee’s coded off of), and the Boxee Beta is hands-down the best software solution for home theater I’ve found.
The organization of online media (and the interweaving of online with local storage) is as good as it gets.  I know there are rights issues; I’m going to ignore them for now.  Strictly as a consumer product, it’s stellar.

A few things I’d recommend though:

1) Run it off a Mac Mini.  I’ve found the software to be more stable on Apple, and the updates more frequent.  While this state of affairs is obviously fluid, when it comes to user interaction with digital media, I would rather bet on Apple, despite their putzing around with silverlight/flash.

2) Use the Apple Remote.  The software’s optimized for it, and it’s just ultra easy.

3) The Boxee iPhone app (at least earlier versions), was fine, but due to the lack of multi-tasking, if someone calls while you’re watching Boxee, good luck pausing the program.

4) If you are set on an iPhone solution for your remote, go with Hippo Remote (http://hipporemote.com/).  Far more versatile (keyboard, touchpad, unique setups for different programs)

5) Don’t connect through VGA.  The resolution sucks, and running sound through 1/8” is never optimal.  Buy this adapter instead (http://bit.ly/bQGuvJ).  HDMI + digital USB sound = better.

6) Or, wait for the Boxee box (http://www.boxee.tv/box).  It’s oddly shaped, but the remote’s awesome.

My two favorite benefits to dedicating a computer to the TV is that (i) you can run torrents on their own machine, and (ii) you can set up a music server for yourself to access your tunes at work.  There are a few solutions for this, but I’m partial to PulpTunes (http://www.pulptunes.com/).

EDIT: I almost forgot the most interactive feature.  The bookmarklet (http://www.boxee.tv/bookmarklet/info).  See an interesting video online?  Want to watch it later on a big screen?  Click the bookmarklet and you’re done.  It’s in your queue at home and waiting to be watched.  magic!

TiVo vs. Boxee - Where Everybody Wins

TiVo released a new product this week called TiVo Premiere.  At first glance, it looks like a direct competitor to the Boxee Box. I can’t wait to try it.

When I got my TiVo Series 2 in 2004, it meant that I was finally able to watch Arrested Development without skipping class.  This was a new world.  It should have been the start of something big.  Video, like a book, could suddenly be put down or picked up at will.  My TiVo became a virtual library in the same sense of my book library: it held the content that shaped me.

Unfortunately, this was not the start of something big.  The FCC tried to foster competition with CableCARDs, but their supportive regulation was lame at best.  It was easier to steal food from a rottweiler than to get your MSO to send you a CableCARD.  Add in a deluge of lawsuits related to commercial skipping and rebroadcast rights (apparently we hadn’t laid this bugaboo to rest with the VCR/Betamax suits of the 1980s), and instead of innovation in the DVR market, we got stagnation and frustration.

Here’s the craziest part: the UI on my Series 2 TiVo (circa 2003/4) is still faster, easier to use and more beautiful than any DVR UI I’ve used since (including Optimum Online, Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner).  Based in Linux, it featured transparent overlays (so I could browse programs and watch TV at the same time), simple season pass setup and an alphabetical listing of my record programs.  I just named three features that most DVRs today still lack.  Go ahead and ask any TiVo user how they compare TiVo’s interface to Comcast, Time Warner, Optimum Online or DirecTV.  I don’t care if they haven’t used a TiVo in five years, they’ll still laugh at the question, because quite frankly, there is no comparison.  TiVo was better than these current products seven years ago.  The MSOs should be ashamed.  So should regulators, but that’s a matter for another post.

Luckily, the tide in television content delivery is finally turning back toward innovation.  After years without commercial progress (MythTV, XBMC and other open-source alternatives did continue to flourish thanks to a dedicated and vibrant community of developers), a few startups have begun rolling out worthy successors to TiVo’s promise.  Boxee, with its beta release, was the first to take a leap forward.  Indeed, the first time I used Boxee Beta was the closest I’ve come to recapturing the feeling I had the first time I used TiVo.  The feeling that, yes, of course this is how TV is supposed to work.  How many products have given you that feeling of wonder?  I can’t think of many.

It’s no exaggeration to say that TiVo turned me from a reader to a viewer.  There’s only so much time in the day, and if I have to spend most of my time in a channel ignoring or filtering the content it delivers, I’m ejecting.  TiVo made broadcast TV personal to me in the same way novels were.  Boxee Beta did the same with internet video.  It looks like TiVo wants to deliver the same experience again.  I don’t know if it will win the space, but I can’t wait to watch the competition.  I’ve been waiting since 2004.

Searching for a more efficient onscreen keyboard

Because I run Boxee off a Mac Mini, my main interface with the software is the Apple Remote.  As a result, whenever I want to search for a program, I’m relegated to keying in names letter-by-letter via the onscreen keyboard.  This, we can all agree, is a pretty significant pain in the ass.  I know Boxee and TiVo agree—that’s why they’re releasing new remotes with built-in keyboards.  But at least for Boxee, not everyone who uses the software is going to have the new remote.  So it’s worthwhile to explore how to make the annoyance of onscreen text input into less of an annoyance.  Here’s my take.

Boxee’s current setup is an alphabetical keyboard laid out in a 6x5 grid.  You key a letter, then move on to the next.  This is the classical way to approach the problem.  Sure, some use QWERTY and others play with different grid sizes, but all approaches are fundamentally linear, and that’s not ideal.  Ideally, you’d develop a new keyboard layout optimized letter distances.  But people have neither the time nor desire to learn a new keyboard layout (exhibit A: the Dvorak keyboard).

Current Layout

This is Boxee’s current layout.  The * is where you enter into the field.  ‘_’ is spacebar.  Excel helps to quickly map distances between letters, measured by number of directional clicks required: A to B = 1; A to H = 2; P to S = 4.  And so on.  Now let’s assume that it’s usually enough to enter 5 letters to locate a show (i.e., after 5 letters are entered, the list of possible shows is down to one screen’s worth).  Counting the clicks required to key in the first 5 letters of a few Boxee favorites—Lost, The Daily Show, How I Met Your Mother, Dollhouse, Caprica)—it takes an average of ~3.4 clicks per letter (stdev of 0.8).  But that’s a small sample.  We can get the global average from the distance map (spoiler: it’s 3.4).  Seems pretty good.

So my two hypotheses for improvement: 1) separate the vowels; 2) recenter the cursor after each click.

Option 1: Separate the vowels

The Dvorak keyboard separates vowels from consonants; this makes intuitive sense—vowels and consonants represent two groups of characters that tend to alternate in words.  At least one sufficient explanation for Dvorak’s failure to catch on was the hardware entrenchment of QWERTY.  That dynamic still holds.  Clearly, radical changes in key placement won’t fly—people know QWERTY and alphabetical, and that’s a state of nature.  But if we drop the vowels to their own line and leave the consonants in alphabetical order, the result doesn’t offend our keyboard schemas all that much.:

Using the testing method described above, we get a sample average of 3.6 clicks per letter (stdev of 0.8).  So, yeah, that’s worse.  Well…it was a fun hypothesis.

Option 2: Recenter the cursor

When you play whack-a-mole, you keep the mallet centered; you don’t leave it on the last mole’s hole while you wait for the next one to pop up.  Applying that logic here: what if we kept the alphabetical layout and set the cursor to recenter on ‘O’ after each letter input?  With this new condition, average clicks per letter decreases from 3.4 to 2.3 for the sample (2.6 globally).  Stdev decreases from 0.8 to 0.3.  That’s a ~33% more efficient process with 1/4 the variability—by definition, a better process.  So long as you believe the efficiency gains outweigh any confusion, then this represents a better process.  If it takes 20 seconds to enter a title, and a user averages 5 title entries per day, the amount of time that user spends inputting titles in a month drops from 50 to ~33 minutes or about the same amount of time it takes to watch a TED talk. That’s real time.

Charts!

Here’s a probability distribution of the global key mappings:

More efficient = larger lumps further to the left. You can see that recentering yields the best distribution of direction key presses per letter.  And I believe (though I could be wrong) that users would adapt almost immediately to cursor recentering.  If that’s true, this tweak worth considering.  Does it make a huge difference in UX?  No.  Will it make lovers out of haters?  Nope.  But it makes the UX more pleasant at minimal cost.  To me, that’s always worthwhile.

Tagxedo!

Tagxedo is a next-generation word cloud generator that’s simply incredible.  I’ve been playing with it for the better part of two hours so far and man, it’s fun.  Here are my two favorite creations:

Obama Hope poster - words drawn from his inaugural address

Boxee logo - words drawn from Avner Ronen’s chat on gdgt.com

I’m turning on photo replies in case anyone wants to post their own.

The Coming War: Apple (and Boxee?) vs. NBC/Comcast

From last night’s interview with Steve Jobs at d8:

Steve: The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go to market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us… ask Google in a few months.

7:56PM Steve: So all you can do is ADD a box to the TV. You just end up with a table full of remotes, a cluster of boxes… and that’s what we have today. The only way that’s going to change is if you tear up the set top box, give it a new UI, and get it in front of consumers in a way they’re going to want it. The TV is going to lose in our eyes until there is a better go to market strategy… otherwise you’re just making another TiVo.

I read this to mean the ultimate battle for TV will be fought over spectrum allocation. Because of the way our IP regime lock up streams for broadcasters, they’ve had little incentive to innovate.  As a consequence, content and advertising delivery innovation “over the top” has wildly outpaced such innovation within the broadcast stream.  Apple clearly sees a massive monetization opportunity in content (and ad) delivery to lean-back devices, but sees the two-box solution as untenable.  To win the war for video delivery, they need bandwidth.  To get bandwidth, they need to convince the FCC to allocate spectrum away from broadcasters and toward broadband.

In the meantime, Apple (more specifically, Steve Jobs, as Disney’s largest shareholder) appears uniquely positioned to push content providers to offer their shows online in parallel with broadcast—they’ve got the motive, the means and “give” (via their monetization platform).  In that sense, their incentives are aligned with Boxee, but it’s gonna be an uphill battle to open up those content streams beyond the iTunes store.  If I’m Boxee (or USV, or anyone interested in perpetuating innovation in online content delivery platforms), I’m thinking about putting a lobbyist on retainer to make sure that any play by Apple for online delivery of broadcast streams is either open or license structured (that is, if NBC decides to deliver a live or “effectively live” stream online, they’d be required to allow anyone with an FCC-licensed platform to deliver it—basically, analogize online delivery platforms to the airwaves).

I concede that this idea is only about 10% baked.  What I’m thinking about here is the danger of platform-restricted content.  The whole point of the internet is to democratize the delivery of information (see: the net neutrality debate).  I consider video content “information” in the same sense as text.  Therefore, I see anti-competitive danger in restricting its delivery to a specific platform, be it Boxee or the next Apple TV product.

To spur innovation in content delivery platforms, we need to allow some form of open access by those platforms to content providers.  Otherwise, we’ll end up with the same innovation problems we’ve seen with the duopoly structure of cable.  Does anyone think Time Warner’s interface is optimal?  Does anyone doubt they would be pushed to do better if they didn’t have a regulatory monopoly/duopoly on their delivery channel?  I recognize that such a grant was required to incentivize the deployment of the network infrastructure in the first place, but if (when?) the delivery of what we now call “broadcast content” moves to broadband (as defined by spectrum allocation), we need to ensure that we don’t copy a regulatory scheme based on recouping buildout costs onto a network without those costs.

I want to see an ecosystem of competition in video content delivery.  As video content product becomes more fragmented, the need for innovation in discovery and delivery platforms scales exponentially. For consumers to get the platforms we deserve, we need to ensure that Boxee (or any other startup) has the same ability to access and deliver content as Apple or Google.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t allow NBC to develop its own content delivery platform, but as a consumer I prefer that that the delivery platform be decoupled from the production platform, with the latter subject to open access regulation.  Forcing delivery platforms to compete on the basis of design (rather than content) is optimal for consumers.

Of course, if I’m NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox, I’m fighting tooth and nail for things to come out the other way…

Boxee iPad App Request: The Perfect Remote

I’m really excited to watch Boxee on an iPad, but as someone who’s invested time and money in a killer home theater setup, I’d love if Boxee would use the iPad to solve the fact that remotes suck as a means for interacting with content.  The iPad is an awesome content consumption device, yes, but it also has the potential to be the greatest companion remote ever.  

What I’d like to see is pretty simple: a Boxee remote app for the iPad that presents the Boxee menu structure in parallel with the video playing through Boxee on my Mac Mini.  A persistent, inch-tall band would contain controls for the currently playing video (play, pause, etc.), but the bulk of the screen would be taken up with the classic boxee interface, allowing me to browse content without interrupting the main screen (comparable to how I can now concurrently browse and listen to music in iTunes).  For bonus points, the iPad’s onscreen keyboard makes text search easy.

I’m all for pushing the limits of the iPad, but let’s not forget that this device can expand the possibilities for tools that don’t warrant the iPad’s cost on their own.  Few people want to pay $500 for a touchscreen remote, but I’m sure many people would love to have the $500 remote experience for free on a device they already own.