Boxee Will Bow In 3-4 Products in 2011, CEO Says
Boxee will be in 3-4 products in 2011 that will be designed around Blu-ray players and TVs, CEO Avner Rosen told us Wednesday at the CEA Line Shows conference in New York. The online video service will likely be built into the products rather than marketed as a standalone Boxee set-top box, shipment of which was recently postponed to late November from July, Rosen said.
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The Android-based Boxee set-top ($200), which will be sold and distributed by D-Link, required more work on its browser, 10.1 Adobe flash player and its ability to provide near Blu-ray quality video, Rosen said. The Boxee set-top is built around a Nvidia Tegra 250 dual core Arm-11 processor with a 2 GHz clockspeed and 1 GB of RAM. “We had an option of launching it on time and it was ready to ship, but we thought the browser experience and flash playback weren’t good enough and HD was limited,” Rosen said. “We figured we'd get the first one out when we felt more comfortable” with it, he said.
Despite the setback, Boxee hasn’t lost anything by missing the holiday season since the category itself -- video downloads -- is relatively young, Rosen said. There will still be room for Boxee despite Apple’s readying a new version of its Apple TV and Google TV’s expected arrival in the fall, Rosen said. “I would never think a few months would make or break any hardware product,” Rosen said. “When time matters is whether there is significant shift in consumer behavior. I don’t think that is what is happening now and there isn’t a category of devices that comes out and makes” the Boxee set-top irrelevant.
The Boxee service is continuing to grow. It recently signed an agreement with Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow to develop a premium content platform. It has 1.2 million registered users and 150 developers have created 350 Boxee applications, Rosen said. While Boxee raised $6 million, it will likely seek additional funding in 2011 from CE companies, partners or private investors, said Rosen, who declined to say how much the company is seeking. “We will definitely do another round of financing before we can start generating real revenues,” Rosen said.