Congress held a hearing today examining the proposed acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast. Speaking before the committee were Brian Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast and Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC.

During the hearing the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, Rep. Rick Boucher, asked Zucker “What about Boxee?”.  Here’s the clip with the transcript below:

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): What about Boxee? Mr. Zucker you probably are in a better position to answer that. Did Hulu block the Boxee users from access to the Hulu programs?

Zucker (NBC): This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA): “Well would you have negotiations with Boxee upon request?”

Zucker (NBC): “We have always said that we’re open to negotiations.”

I’d like to set the record straight regarding Boxee’s access to Hulu. Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.

Above, Mr. Zucker says the original decision was made by Hulu’s management. That is correct, but as Jason Kilar (Hulu’s CEO) wrote in his post, the request came from NBC. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.”

There are now close to a million people using Boxee. When they watch shows from Hulu they are watching the ads and generate real revenues to NBC. We hope we will be able to work with NBC and offer more content and value to Boxee users as we believe a good number of our users will also be willing to pay one-time or subscription fees to access NBC’s content.

Mr. Zucker says they always said they are open to negotiations. That has not been our experience, but at this point, we will take Mr. Zucker’s offer at face value and will contact him. We are eager to work with both Comcast and NBCU to bring more content on more devices to our users. We believe the Internet represents a great opportunity for content owners and we hope that current artificial barriers put on distribution over the Internet will be taken down.

Users want to see more content on Boxee. Content owners want to be paid for what they produce (whether that’s TV Shows, movies, music, or applications). We don’t believe these are conflicting interests.

This is why we plan to release a Payment Platform this summer where users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price as they wish, including pay-per-view and subscription. Content partners will have the flexibility to decide what they make available, whether it’s premium content, content from their existing library, or extras that will never make it “on air”.

As content owners benefit, so will Boxee. While details are still to-be-determined, Boxee will charge a small fee (i.e. lower than the 30% charged by many app stores) for transactions which we enable. This beginning to the Boxee business model ties our success as a business to the success of our partners.

This is a direct result of the generational shift towards over the top video during the past few years. Recent college grads will tell you the Internet is vital to them in a way PayTV could never be. Their social, professional, and family lives are reinforced by (and sometimes wholly self-contained within) the social networks, blogs, and interaction the Internet provides. This generation has turned to the Internet for their entertainment needs as well.

The move towards the Internet as a main source of entertainment does not mean everything will be free however. The iTunes store has already shown us that people are willing to pay for content when it’s affordable and easy to access. Our goal is to equip the content providers that we’ve spoken with over the past year, both big and small, with a way to monetize their content above and beyond the advertising-only model.

It’s our belief that the Internet is ready to become the 4th method of distribution for broadcast & premium content after Cable, Satellite, and IPTV (FiOS, u-Verse, etc.). In the case of Satellite and IPTV, it took an act of congress to open up these delivery methods. This time it’s people who are demanding this change.

The Internet represents a great opportunity for the major media companies and for the independent content producers to create more engaging and immersive experiences around their content and for them to be paid for more eyeballs on yet another screen. The connected living room represents a new medium, one in which great value could be generated. There are also many business models that will thrive including Ad-supported, pay-per-view, subscription and authentication (e.g. TV Everywhere).

We hope we can play a key role in enabling these content owners to showcase and monetize their offerings while creating the best experience possible for users.

If you are a content owner and interested to be one of our first launch partners please email content@boxee.tv to start a conversation.

6 days, 4 awards, 2 booths, 1 suite, dozens of meetings, hundreds of interviews, thousands of demos, multiple all-nighters… The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was a mixture of excitement, adrenaline, exhaustion, and a lot of hard work.  Quotes like this one from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones about the Boxee Box by D-Link make it all worth it though, “finally we had a device that could do what few in the tech industry have managed – make Apple’s rival product look distinctively second best.”

First and foremost. a big thank you to all of our users who have carried us this far, especially those who have been vocal about what they love about Boxee and what we could do better. We continue to rely on your feedback to improve Boxee and bring connected devices into the living room that are driven by your needs.

Secondly, it’s been great working with D-Link and Nvidia on our first hardware device, the Boxee Box. Now that it’s been announced, we can’t wait to bring it to market in the 2nd quarter of this year.  Meanwhile our BD team is hard at work ensuring Boxee will arrive on TVs, game consoles, and other living room devices soon.

As a quick recap, here’s some of the awards and articles we garnered over the course of the show…

Awards:

LAPTOP’s Best of CES 2010: Best Home Entertainment – Boxee Box by D-Link
Winner Last Gadget Standing
Best of CES: Popular Science Products of the Future
CEA Best of Innovations: Home Theater Accessories
G4 Best of the Best at CES
Dave Graveline’s Top 10 @ CES
CNet Best in Show Finalist: Home Theater

Articles:

BBC – dot.Rory: CES 2010: Last Gadget Standing
CNN – Boxee Box crowned ‘Last Gadget Standing’ at CES
NBC Washington – Boxee Box Just Made Couch Potatoes’ Lives Even Easier
Wired.com Gadget Lab – Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote
Engadget – Hands-on with the Boxee Box
Scobleizer: Part I — Hot Startups to Watch in 2010
TechCrunch – Boxee Beta Now Available To The Masses
Lifehacker – First Look at the Boxee Beta – Boxee beta
Gizmodo – Beta Now Available for Public Download, Box Has Tegra 2 Chip
Mashable – Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed
Ubergizmo’s Best of CES
…more from Google

Videos:

Here I am presenting Boxee at Last Gadget Standing.   The intro video was streamed from Adult Swim’s site for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job (a recommendation if you ever enjoyed Mr. Show with Bob & David).

And here’s Avner running through a demo of Boxee’s Beta software at the D-Link booth.

Photos:

We had a pretty busy booth… lots of people came over to get demos and hear more about Boxee and the Boxee Box by D-Link.

(to see 3 photos from the show and 36 other photos of us partying… go here)

We couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2010.  Thanks for all the support and we look forward to bringing you much more in the months to come!

*Special thanks to Boxee users @BobSuicide, @JaylinSuicide, and @iMelody who worked our booth with an air of professionalism, intelligence, and passion we could not have paid for.

Many have been asking about it and we’ve been eager to share the details of what’s inside the Boxee Box by D-Link. Today we’re making a joint announcement with NVIDIA and D-Link revealing that the Boxee Box is powered by the Tegra 2 (T20) platform!

The T20 is based around a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU with that additional graphic umphhh NVIDIA is famous for, allowing us to deliver our user experience in a small box, and very low power consumption (we’re green too )

With Tegra 2 powering the Boxee Box you can:

• Enjoy a fluid and responsive user interface that is similar to the UI performance up till now available only on full blown PCs
• Play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD video content from the Internet
• Play Adobe® Flash® 10.1 content from across the web, including HD content

More inside the Box:

• RF chip by Nordic – to support a great remote control experience that is not dependent on line-of-sight and can work from anywhere in the house
• 802.11N wireless chip by Broadcom

What’s not in the Box:

• No hard-drive – We discussed hard-drive at length with D-Link, and figured people already have storage solutions, and that we should do our best to reduce the price of the Boxee Box. You’ll be able to connect your choice of storage devices directly to the Box using USB
• No IR – While we realize many people are using universal remotes, we believe there is a greater benefit having a full QWERTY keyboard, and the right way to do that was RF. We really wanted to also support IR, for various reasons we could not get it as part of the build. We continue supporting this in software, so you can use any IR dongle and continue using your universal remote with Boxee.

Ever been at work and felt guilty for watching videos of cute kittens? We figured out a way to make you feel better about this — our co-worker Casey Pugh developed the Boxee Bookmarklet which makes it easy to watch those videos later when you’re home alone.

The Bookmarklet  lives in your browser toolbar. Click it on any* web page containing a video and we’ll instantly add it to your Boxee Queue, essentially allowing you to watch it later, particularly on your TV. It’s a cinch to use, too. Just drag this link (add to boxee) to your browser toolbar and click it whenever you want to save a video to your Queue. For more detailed instructions, check out this page we whipped up.

This tool is the first step towards a much improved Boxee experience in your browser, making it easier to access and manage your content from anywhere.  The first of many steps in 2010.

* Temporarily, while we continue to develop the Bookmarklet, it’s compatible with only the following sites:

• Vimeo,   Blip.tv,   Youtube,  Break,   Metacafe,   Viddler,   The Onion,   Collegehumor,  Dailymotion,   Howcast,   Mtv,   Funnyordie, and   Gametrailers.

The Boxee Beta is officially out. You can grab it here.

The Beta is available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu (including 64bit.. ). The version is still not available for Apple TV, yet, but we are working with the atv-creator community, and look forward to having news on this front.

In the past 4 weeks since we announced the upcoming Beta we had the help of tens of thousands of early access users who tested the Beta on all different platforms and gave us great feedback. Hundreds of bugs have been opened and we’ve been working diligently to resolve as many of them as we could. We feel the version deserves the upgrade from Alpha grade to Beta grade, and we’re going to spend the next year improving it, so we can release 1.0 at CES next year

For more details on what’s new in the Beta you check out the blog post from Dec 7th.

As always with a new release we are also launching with new content partners.

“TV Shows” gets content from

We’re excited to announce that we’ve signed an agreement with TV.com to bring their show and community information into the Boxee Beta’s TV Show menu. TV.com has been a pioneer in building the world’s largest online television guide, with the most comprehensive catalog of content covering over a million episodes across 21,000 televisions shows. Their show listings, information and community greatly enhances the television viewing experience for its millions of monthly users. We’ll be working over the coming months to give Boxee users access to great TV.com content on popular shows like Family Guy, Heroes, NCIS, South Park, House, and How I Met Your Mother. Stay Tuned!”

blip.tv

blip.tv has been available on Boxee through RSS for a while, but now there  is a Boxee App that makes it easy to browse by Genre or find a show by name. Blip is fast becoming the platform of choice for independent content producers. It offers content owners a quick and easy way to publish their content and as important real opportunities to monetize it.

Mike, Dina, Justin and the rest of the team are executing flawlessly. We love working with them and are proud to be part of the growing NYC start-up scene that Blip and its all-star team is helping to nurture.

IGN

The IGN brand is synonymous with Gaming online. They’ve been around since 1996 producing great content and creating a vibrant community around it (IGN has been my primary source for Game Reviews since forever, so I am really excited that we have it on Boxee now). Their focus has expanded since then and today they are “obsessed with Gaming, Entertainment, and everything guys enjoy”

The IGN App on Boxee gives you access to their top videos, game reviews and their original series.

The Wolfman

We’ve just released a new application for the upcoming movie, The Wolfman, which looks awesome.  Check out the new app in the Featured section of Boxee to get a taste of how content producers can very easily create something more compelling for the TV than a traditional 30-second advertisement.

—

If you need help with installing or using Boxee check out our support section.

If you have ideas for new features you’d like to see in future versions of Boxee please post them on our Get Satisfaction page.

If you would like to report bugs please post them on http://jira.boxee.tv

It’s the first press event at CES and time to tease you before our big announcement on the 7th so here’s a sneak peek of something about the Boxee Box that we didn’t show off at the Boxee Beta Event in December.

The Boxee Box Remote – It’s got a QWERTY keyboard!  When we started designing the Boxee Box remote we wanted something simple like the 6-button Apple Remote.  As we began adding features to the Beta it became obvious that for people to really get the most out of the box it was going to need to do more than just point and click.  Rather than subject anyone to another on-screen keyboard we decided the Boxee Box should benefit from a full QWERTY keyboard like you might have on a mobile phone.  So here it is – the first drawing shows Astro’s original idea for the piece while the flat image below gives you a better idea of the near-final layout on the keyboard.

Stay tuned to the blog for posts later in the week detailing more hardware details about the Boxee Box by D-Link, more content partners, and another trick or two up our sleeve. If you’re at the show, make sure to meet us on the show floor or at any of the other press events at the show.

–Andrew

Next week we will move to a new office in NYC (57W 16th St. 3rd floor). The previous tenant was Bonobos (we’re trying to get a few of those pants as part of the deal..).

It is a new neighborhood for us and we’re looking forward to becoming “locals” in a variety of new places.

When it comes to coffee we will adopt Cafe Grumpy as our coffee shop (4 blocks + 1.5 avenues = 7min, which is totally worth it for a good cup of coffee).

I will have to abandon my campaign to become the mayor of Stumptown on Foursquare, but I am looking forward to running for the mayorship of Grumpy. The incumbent mayor is spending a lot of time in the gym, so I hope my unhealthy lifestyle will be an advantage in this case, and that while he is working on his cardiovascular fitness i’ll be sipping an espresso and taking over as mayor.

Any recommendations for nearby places will be welcomed. Willing to walk 10min for a good coffee/pizza/burger/indian/sushi/tapas.

View Boxee NYC Office in a larger map

It’s 8 days until the beginning of events at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Do you know where your Boxee experience will be?

On the show floor(South Hall #36232) – We’ll have a great demo of the Beta & the Boxee Box at the D-Link booth.

In a Suite (@ the Wynn) – If you’d like to set up a private meeting with Boxee please send an email to bizdev@boxee.tv

At Planet Hollywood with Next New Networks (9-12pm, Jan 6th, @ Planet Hollywood) – Enjoy a few drinks, party with Obama Girl, and see the Boxee Box in action. RSVP to rsvpvegas@nextnewnetworks.com.

Press Events – In an effort to really get our money’s worth out of our press guy (me), we’ll be attending every major press event at CES this year.  Whether it’s CES Unveiled (Jan 5th), The Digital Experience with Pepcom (Jan 6th), Lunch at Piero’s 1 (7th), Showstoppers (7th), or Lunch at Piero’s 2 (8th) I will be there with my requisite 13 items of flare and a Boxee Box.  Come by and I’ll tell you all about what we’re releasing at the show and our plans for the future.  Massages and stiff drinks are welcome.

If you’ve never been to CES before, our friend Jeremy Toeman does a good wrap-up of how to prep for the show for booth staff, but it also works for attendees.

Awards

Now that we have a gadget with Boxee on it we’re elegible for even more awards this year.  Some are editor’s choices like the CNet Best in Show and G4’s Best of the Best while others require audience participation like Last Gadget Standing (LGS).  Last year LGS organizer Robin Raskin shot down my application for Boxee because “we weren’t a gadget.”  Pshaw! “We’ll be back next year,” I told her.

Well Robin, it’s 2010 and we’re ready. The Boxee Box has already advanced to the final round and we need your help ensuring its triumph. 
Check out the competitors and send your votes Boxee’s way!

If you can’t make it out to CES, don’t worry, we’ll be sharing all the latest and greatest right here on the blog so stay tuned!

– Andrew

While Monday’s Boxee Beta Unveiling has many excited about the upcoming Boxee Box (it’s quickly becoming gdgt’s most wanted media streamer), we know there are still many hoping to get Boxee to their TV for the holidays, and don’t mind using a mini-PC to do so. With nettops and netbooks on sale for the season we wanted to give you a few low cost computers that will run the Boxee Beta well.

We’ve mentioned the major improvements to the Boxee Beta’s back-end to help Windows machines with a dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) run better looking video with less effort (thanks to the Direct X Video Acceleration & Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 support we’re developing).  We’ve done a lot of work with  NVIDIA to optimize Boxee for their ION platform which has a dedicated graphics chip to turn up the visuals on compact, low-power PCs with performance up to 10X faster than similar systems.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Acer Revo	HP Mini 311	Zotac ION

Keep in mind we’re talking about improvements in the Beta so the software won’t be available publicly until the beginning of next year (although you can sign up for the Beta Pre-Release list here), but if you’re taking advantage of holiday deals we want to ensure you’re picking up something that will benefit from the work we’ve done.  While we’re talking gifts, here are a few others we like…

Give Netflix

If that special someone already has Boxee, you might think about expanding what they can watch by giving them a gift subscription to Netflix for access to thousands of Movies and TV Shows they can play straight from Boxee.

Give Anime from Crunchyroll

If there is an Anime / Asian entertainment fan on your gift list, save the money you were going to spend on that ultimate anime DVD package and instead get them an account at Crunchyroll.com – the largest source of Asian entertainment in the U.S. They’re running a promo now – pay with PayPal and get $20 back, which means a 3 month subscription actually earns you a nickel(ends today so hurry!).

**Update – Crunchyroll promotion extended through Monday.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Boxee!

–Andrew