Boxee : Internet TV :: Flickr : Digital Photos (circa 2006)
by petermeI’m neck-deep on a project looking at the future of media. Of the many threads to pursue is just what is going on with television — TV on your PC, web on your TV, television content across three (or is it now four?) screens, etc. etc. Frankly, the landscape is a bit of a mess.
It’s reminiscent of the world of digital photography circa 2004. People were taking pictures not just with digital cameras (which surpassed film cameras in sales that year) but with cameraphones as well. Each camera had its own software for managing photos, and there were independent tools like iPhoto and Picasa. Folks wanted to do all kinds of things with their photos — email them, print them, post them to their blog or other personal site. If you thought of digital photography as a product and service ecosystem, there were a lot of individual solution points that weren’t at all connected. It was a hassle moving photos from devices to software to services to the people you wanted to share them with.
Into that confusion sauntered Flickr. Flickr did a lot right, but I suspect its primary value is that it brought some semblance of order to this chaotic ecosystem, and did so in a remarkably straightforward way. Flickr made it easy to get your pictures off your phone (for years “cameraphone” was a top tag, because it was added by default), and then you could actually do things with them.
Clearly, this fractured world of television needs a service to bring some semblance of order. Boxee is the first significant player to do so, laying over a friendlier interface to the morass of content-owner, content-provider, and other Web sites providing TV content. That said, Boxee is just one solution, and many others are sniffing around this space as well (Google TV being the most prominent.)
I find it interesting that immense value can be added not by introducing new technologies or products, but by providing a service that simply helps make sense of what is already out there, coordinating existing components.
Entries (RSS)
June 23rd, 2010 at 4:36 am
Hi Peter:
Like this!
“laying over a friendlier interface to the morass of content-owner, content-provider, and other Web sites providing TV content.”
Looks like thats half of the solution, the ability to display content (independent of source) for users to watch, share and move as they please. Easier said than done
June 28th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Peter, I’m really glad to see you use Boxee as an example of an app that’s doing it right. I was the user experience designer for their beta, released in early January. They wanted to make their alpha product — designed by their developers with mostly hackers in mind — into something more mainstream-friendly, and believed that an in-depth UX process could get them there.
You can read more about the research, strategy and design work I did here: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2010/01/27/the-ux-design-process-for-the-boxee-beta/