Most of what I’ve read about Boxee has been about what it does and not what impact it will have. I foresee a small potential bump in the road not for the people over at Boxee but in your living room. The issue relates not to software or hardware but more to over specialised/niche content. If we ignore for a minute the eager cutting edge of society I think most average households will find boxee a very strange presence.

Up until now most living room content has been created for the masses. This means that if over Christmas I turn on the telly, across the few hundred channels I get there will be something that I and anyone else of all ages and interests in the room will find vaguely interesting.
If I’ve been organised I might bring up something I saved earlier off my Skybox/TiVo, even then the content saved is still probably acceptable by most as it was created with that in mind..

This Christmas I hooked up a computer to the family TV and showed them the delights of Boxee and we watched a few programs. There was however one problem. Nothing I wanted to watch interested them. While 20 minutes of entertaining YouTube videos was good, it wasn’t particularly relaxing although was good to get everyone talking about what they’d seen last year.

Yes there will inevitably be an iPlayer and a Hulu and all the other mainstream shows that we find on the TV. And yes it’s a great victory against the current living room gatekeepers. It will however I suspect lead to people getting into more niche shows and really fighting for the remote.

What I can guarantee is, is that when I want to sit down and watch Drawn Together when I get back from work there will be a fight over the remote.

Background
Towards the end of 2008 according to Techcrunch, Boxee raised $4m to build their socially networked media centre built on the open source XMBC software.

Since they’ve successfully partnered with D-Link to provide you with an inexpensive sub $200 media centre for your home. I think that the whole thing is going to be great and I will be first in the midnight queue wherever they’re being given out.

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