Twilio + Boxee Developer Contest and Hackathon March 30 - April 11

Yeah I agree, case in point is that I never find myself watching stupid reality TV shows anymore.

I'm waiting for a Boxee Box to cancel my cable subscription. Most things I watch these days are either from Netflix, or iTunes, with a lot of the remainder appearing on Hulu. I realize I'll be losing local news (never watch that anyway) and live events (the Olympics), but I'm willing to do that at this point. And honestly, even more than saving money, it's about convenience. I have a nice stereo hooked up to my computer that I want to listen to music (last.fm, mp3, rhapsody) through. I have tv shows downloaded from itunes or ripped from DVD. It's much more convenient to access that stuff from a centralized place. This is vastly different from Web TV; I don't want to browse the web on my TV. I have a laptop.

I was a long time Windows Media Center user while my husband was at Microsoft, and it was great - we used our Xbox to run it. That was even before things like Netflix on demand (and before I discovered Apple products). I think the idea is that you stil want to get the viewing experience of a big beautiful TV screen with surround sound for watching movies - and since more and more of the good content I want to watch is on the web, I need to find a way to get it to my TV.

I think people are still discovering how much good "TV" isn't actually on TV anymore.

Valid question that should be asked of any product and one for which I think Boxee has an interesting answer both from the perspective of the user and the developer.

The userbase for Boxee (which just eclipsed 1M unique users a few months ago) currently seems to be divided into two constituencies: high-end home theater enthusiasts and early adopters sick of cable. I believe if you asked either why they chose Boxee, they would respond that it is a superior living room experience to any that are available that works with the platform and media of their choosing. Win/Mac/Linux/ATV compatibility, a huge list of supported codecs and containers, and a singular social experience can't be found elsewhere. Like all people who use their television, they want to watch whatever they want and share that experience with their friends. Whether you want the slickest, smoothest interface for your home theatre rig or want to stop subsidizing Comcast's imminent monopoly, I think Boxee fulfills those demands uniquely.

The far more interesting question I think is who are the developers and why they would choose to hack on Boxee. As a freelance developer working on an Internet with a limitless amount of interesting problems to solve, getting that Internet on the television is a deeply interesting and still very nascent space. Television has lagged behind nearly every other medium by a decade in going online - the developers working on this now have the ability to shape how television will look for years to come.

Boxee is situated singularly among the different platforms a hacker could work on in three key ways: audience, ease and power. Few IPTV platforms have Boxee's popularity with a real critical mass to which a developer can connect his/her idea. Further, the API is very simple to get started with many developers getting something working in an afternoon's time. Finally, you have the power of a full Python interpreter on your hands. Unlike a lot of IPTV platforms that offer developers the ability to create widgets in a tightly confined API, Boxee is a very liberal platform that can produce real apps that can do zOMG awesome stuff.

As a developer, the question that got me hooked on Boxee was "What if the people deciding what television looked like looked a lot more like me?"

I suspect you'd agree it would look a shite sight better than it does now. I'm not sure that is a "Web TV thing." I think it's more a free-as-in-speech TV thing.