Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

I recently found some time to play around with two XBMC-based media center apps, Boxee and Plex, and I have to say that I'm impressed. Not only with their design and feature sets, but with their ability to deliver web-optimized content to a television.
 
Gaming consoles have long had the interaction model between users, the television, and a computer figured out, so it's not surprising that these media center applications evolved from the XBOX modder community. What is surprising is the extent to which they have been embraced by early adopters. It's difficult to estimate the size of these platforms' combined install base, but judging from the amount of buzz they're generating, it's considerable.

A large portion of the success of these apps can be attributed to the growing importance of the problem they help solve. Namely, that lots of people have amassed large amounts of music and video on their local computers and want a higher-fidelity consumption experience than what's afforded by iTunes or Windows Media Player and a 15" laptop screen. In addition to locally stored content, people are increasingly interested in watching streaming video from sites like Hulu and TV.com from their sofas on their shiny new HDTVs. Boxee and Plex do a great job of solving the problem of "the last ten feet" bridging the divide between the desk and the sofa.

Delivering computer optimized content to the sofa is the primary driver for adoption of this type of software, but there's another major attraction, features. For instance, the ability to pull down related content based on local media files. Both applications seamlessly blend reviews, ratings, and album art into the interface and in doing so added a lot of value to my existing media.

Another attractive aspect of these applications are the crop of supported iPhone remote applications that have popped up in the App Store. They represent a super-smart approach to solving a key interaction challenge associated with the sofa to computer model, lack of a wireless keyboard. The apps makes use of the iPhone's screen for navigation and keyboard for text input and while they won't please everyone, they do pass an important litmus test, they make use of hardware that many users already own. Instead of imposing requirements for new hardware, as other major media center software vendors have done in the past (you know who you are). All in all, these apps are another step toward liberation of content trapped in the desktop interaction paradigm.

Dan Neumann