it was early 2004, Microsoft has just recently launched their Media Center PC and I went online and bought a bulky, noisy $2,000 Sony Vaio Desktop and put it under our TV (despite the protests of my wife).

a few months later Tom came to visit me from Israel, and I proudly showed him my setup. alas, he was not impressed, instead he told me he’ll soup-up my Xbox machine and show me how a real Media Center works.
he modded my Xbox. installed the latest version of xbmc and made me feel stupid for spending $2,000 on a PC, while I could get xbmc running on my existing Xbox and enjoy a much better experience.

Tom and I have been friends since we were kids. I have a vivid memory of the day when he and his family moved next door in 1988. he came over to introduce himself, I showed him my new PC and he dissed it… said I should come over and see his Amiga… so not much has changed..

we always wanted to start something together, and ever since he introduced me to xbmc Tom insisted we should build something around it, that we should bring this great piece of software to the masses. as 2007 was approaching (I vowed to leave the comforts of my corporate gig in Jan 2007 no matter what) we started throwing around ideas on how could we go about building a company that has xbmc at its core.

we saw how our media consumption has changed. we were watching less and less Cable TV, and spending more and more time using xbmc to watch our videos, listen to music and play slideshows on our TVs. we bounced around ideas on what the future of TV should look like. what a truly connected experience means? how people will share? how would they interact? how would they discover content? what is the role of the web? what kinds of apps people will run on their TV? we drank beer. we smoked. we dug deep. we called it boxee.

so that’s how boxee was born. we put together the “old-crew” (Gidon, Vulkan, Idan), friends we worked with for years, and that are as passionate as us about creating the best damn media center (vulkan was already starting to contribute code to xbmc at the time. working together with yuvalt). we quit our jobs. put most of our savings into the company and got going.

we then reached out to team-xbmc. we met with Pike and Gamester in Copenhagen in the summer of 2007. told them our story. that we are fans and users of xbmc. that we belive in the ideals, philosophy and ethics of open-source. that we’d like to work with them and bring the xbmc platform to the masses. they said something like “sure, as long as you guys stick to GPL, contribute code along the way, and stick to GPL” and that was it. we started working with team-xbmc developers from US, Australia, Sweden, UK, New Zealand, Israel. you should have seen Tom’s proud face when he first got an email from jmarshall.. it’s an honor to work with these guys, and an amazing experience.

so that’s the story.

now it’s all coming together. this weekend in Amsterdam we are having the first ever XBMC DEV CON. an opportunity for team-xbmc to meet in person for the first time and discuss past, present and future. at the end of the event we are launching the Alpha version of boxee.

exciting times.

(if you reached the end of this post, then you should probably go to boxee.tv and sign up for the Alpha and see why we are so passionate about it)