Ok, so that's one person who "would" pay but won't actually pay. So zero sale. When I said "no one" I meant "not any number of people to make a business case." While it might do volumes that a company like mine would be fine to cater to, it would never do numbers that would please the networks nor investors. It would be like Apple trying to make iTunes profitable if the music from it only played on your Mac or PC - no iPods or other music-specific devices. A few people would do it, but hardly in the numbers that make for a very successful product - especially given existing competition.

BTW, Hulu is dropping their price to $8 per month, though I'm not sure what that gets you.




Have you ever used MPlayer or another video player where you can instantly skip forward or backward a specific number of seconds? MPlayer offers two skip amounts in each direction. VLC offers three and they're configurable. SageTV has two by default on their standard remote. When you press one of them the video jumps instantly and begins playing without a hiccup. If you press any of the skips multiple times, you can do so as quickly as you'd like, including holding the button down and the progress bar moves steadily in response to your button presses and video starts playing instantly when you stop issuing the commands.

In the Boxee software on the desktop if you queued up multiple skips like this, even just repeatedly tapping a skip command, video would freeze up and you'd be sitting there watching a paused/frozen frame. On the Box I didn't find the complete freeze, but I didn't find seeking to be instantly responsive, especially when issuing multiple commands. I'm going to have to look at this again in 1.0 to describe exactly what's going on, but if you give MPlayer a look you can also better compare what I'm talking about.

The other question (about completely bungling the release) was of course rhetorical.

I found that the 1.0 didn't even offer very good focus on online content - it was just a mess of random crap that was super difficult to navigate and there was no real solution to filtering or sorting.