Boxee is a company right?

[tgggd86]

Well how are they making money? I don't see ads or donation buttons. The only thing I can think of is that content owners are maybe funding some of this in order to discourage copyright violations by making an easy and free way to view legal content.

[islanddreamer]

Boxee received its first round of VC funding in November. See the blog post:
http://blog.boxee.tv/2008/11/17/welcome-on-board-bijan-and-fred/

[subvertbeats]

Sure, but venture capitalists dont invest unless they can see a demonstrable ROI within a given timeframe.

I dont know enough about boxees business model to comment on how boxee intends to make revenue, but I suspect that STBs play a part in it.

I hope that boxee stays ad free, in its GUI - the ads in content are more than enough :)

One thing that I do think would be cool, and would seem to me to be an obvious goal would be to get boxee to such a mainstream level (I think the STB will be crucial in this) that content providers or aggregators want to develop their own plugins.
The more plays these content providers get, the more advertising revenue they receive. So its in their best interest to provide boxee plugins for their sources - the issue is just a case of cost benefit - eventually boxees use would become widespread enough to make the development cost worth it.
There are then a few creative ways that boxee could get revenue from such a situation....

[scnd]

I'd like to see boxee turn into selling the marketing information..

The stats that they could collect would be outragous, knowing what different groups of people are watching across so many different networks. Seeing that more people 18-24 watch "avatar - the last airbender" than 8-12.

There's some serious money to be made in information monitoring.

((yo, and this isn't creepy stuff either, this is demographics, not individual, so you technophobes stay away, ayyt?))