NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing List for 2009
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BOXEE
HQ: New York City
Founding date: 2007
Funding: $10 million from Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and General Catalyst Partners
Employees: 19
When a scrappy li’l startup using open source tools scares the bejeezus out of the big media networks with just the alpha version of its product, you know it’s on to something. The basics of Boxee are actually quite, well, basic: It’s a media browser designed to bring together all of your media on your big-screen TV. But it spooked Hulu’s content partners/owners to the point that they blocked Boxee users from accessing content on the site, resulting in a very public back-and-forth and an on-again-off-again, unofficial relationship between the two. Others, however, love Boxee’s approach to reinventing television; the company has established official partnerships with the likes of Major League Baseball and Current, for example. The question over how, exactly, Boxee’s going to make money still looms, but for now the startup is focused on building a community — facilitating social recommendations, nurturing an extremely active group of developers and tweeting (to a near-obsessive degree) to its users. Next up for the company: using its recent influx of cash to get its platform on consumer electronics devices. (C.A.)
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Quite surprised that this list doesn’t include any credible Live Streaming player ! Let’s look back next year :)
Actually I know that Ooyala does live streaming – they have been doing a lot lately with the Vans surfing competitions and and some MMA fights
So these are the guys we have to thank for the crappy Postseason.tv
http://mlbsupport.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=72
The Philies game was unwatchable today. I already submitted my refund request. Every playoff game is nothing but constant buffering. Today during the 7th inning the video went out! These guys should watch Sunday Night Football on NBC.com to see how it’s done.
The few minutes that the SNF player was on one 1 bar it was superior to Postseason’s player on 4 bars. 95% of the time I was able to watch the SNF game in HD.
Boxee has what 1000 or 2000 users? total?? it gets way more hype than it deserves. bittorrent 2.0… with a lot less users. this thing will flash out.
@gonzo90017:
the technology for both Sunday Night Football on nbc.com and mlb.com is the same. Inlet powers both. infrastructure may vary, but both begin as HD signal.
I just got an invite to Clicker.com and think it’s the most impressive new site I’ve seen since Hulu. The interface is beautiful and it makes it extremely easy to find shows all over the Web.
I also wanted to comment on Clicker, they’re not making content, but they’re making content a whole lot easier to find.
What about Tubemogul? They have been killing it lately with in-stream analytics.
I’d also include Kaltura. They appear to be the leading open source video management platform, at least in the U.S., and they’re getting a lot of design wins. They integrate well with Drupal and WordPress, and the price for the software starts at zero.
Great list, Liz!
A company I hope you’ll also eyeball for future lists like this is Retrofit Films, digital production company, directors of the recent Sprint/NBC Heroes “tagged media” integrated web series campaign who also produced and directed the teaser web series for The CW’s Vampire Diaries and the animated web series for the The CW’s Smallville entitled Kara & The Chronicles of Krypton, among many others.
We’ve worked pretty closely with the major networks and studios to date, although we wouldn’t say that’s our only niche.
Thanks!
Thanks Todd — I’ll ping you on email.
Life sure would be simpler if there was 1 breakout winner… after years of Tivo doing my thinking it’s hard to remember which shows are hulu or netflix or network sites or… sigh. I know it’s the content providers all wanting their cut and afraid of change but I can still whine can’t i? :)
@Scott, Robert, Len and Whit — Thanks for the suggestions, we definitely considered all of those. I’d say they are each a little earlier in the process than competitors we chose for the list. No doubt they are promising companies, but perhaps next year they will get their due.