Boxee may go to subsidized deals to compete with Apple TV

Boxee may turn to subsidies to help get the price down and better compete in the market, company founder Avner Ronen said in an episode of the This Week in Startups show.He mentioned that the $200 street price for a Boxee Box was "way too expensive" to get mass market adoption and floated the idea as one option for future models. Nothing was definite in the talk and might not necessarily come about with a future deal.

Ronen also provided some brief hints at the possible future of Boxee. Gaming was a possibility as he noted that games had often driven technology adoption, but it would most likely occur through the browser in HTML rather than through proprietary apps.

Boxee hasn't given out sales numbers but has taken a mixed approach to competing with Apple. The hopes to subsidize the Boxee are a first sign of intent to more directly challenge the Apple TV and Roku's Internet Player, both of which hit or dive below the $100 price mark through their use of cheaper but roughly as efficient processors.

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Has Boxee gone to work for "The Man"?

It's interesting that in the same week Boxee indicated that their "Boxee Box" (the D-Link product) would not ship until November (after being unveiled with great fanfare at CES), Sonic Solutions announced an alliance to provide premium video services through the Boxee interface, and presumably the Boxee Box.

It's good timing to hold off on this box. Frankly, the description of the Boxee Box provided by D-Link at CES is a real yawner: "It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and others. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favorite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video."

Not to be too harsh here, but hasn't the industry learned anything from the history of failure in attaching niche video and Web content to new set-top boxes? Akimbo ring a bell?

That's why I think that the new partnership with Sonic gives Boxee some legitimacy and at least some hope that somebody will buy the D-Link box. Consumers want movies and TV shows on the TV ... YouTube and blip.tv are fun distractions, but you're not going to sell enough stand-alone set-top boxes playing solely that content. Now, maybe instead of getting hammered by the folks at Hulu, Boxee will take its unique social networking angle to online content and figure out how to help content providers create a much richer user experience. Then, maybe they'll throw some sportscoats over those t-shirts.