Boxee, whose software helps you watch Internet video on a television set, will soon get its own set-top box.
The company announced a partnership with an unnamed consumer electronics company, and promised more details at an event for Boxee's beta launch on December 7th.
Boxee's software pulls in video from sites like CNN, Comedy Central, YouTube and CBS. It can also download public torrent files and stream music from Internet radio stations. But so far, the software remains in alpha, and can only be used on Linux or Mac-based computers, along with Apple TV.
"This will be the first connected device running Boxee," Avner Ronen wrote on the Boxee Blog, "but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, Blu-ray player, computer, etc."
"Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room," Avner added.
The goal of ubiquity echoes what Netflix has been saying about its Instant Watch service. Increasingly, Netflix is showing up on more devices, including Blu-ray players, HDTVs, TiVo, the Xbox 360 and, most recently, Sony's Playstation 3. You can even access Netflix through Boxee. The two services are quite different, one rooted in public Web video, and the other based on subscription, but they share the same goal of overhauling the way we consume entertainment.
That's why, even though I haven't personally used Boxee, I get excited about what the company is doing. Boxee's on-demand, user-controlled nature is a glimpse into the future of television, and though content owners might not like it -- Hulu, for instance, snuffs any easy ways of watching by television, including Boxee itself -- the march towards on-demand online video seems inevitable. When Boxee's box arrives, I might pick one up.
