![]() “What we wanted was for the people, by the geeks.” Avner began thinking very seriously about something like XBMC, but that would be usable for normal people. About XBMC, he said “It was a great experience, but so hard to get.” Meaning, here’s something cool, but not something most people could ever use. It’s a little hard to tell with Ronen whether he has fond memories of XBMC or whether he just saw it as an important but unrealized idea like a lot of Israelis (warning: generalizations ahead, but I am allowed to make generalizations about Israelis because I am Jewish), he’s stoic and impassive and very, very confident, though he’s a funnier guy than he seems at first. They wouldn’t mention that this hack could revolutionize the home theater–they’d say, you can play Halo for free. That’s the way most modders–the people who’d build one of these XBMC Xboxes for you–would advertise. It could also play illegally burned Xbox games. Or any NES, SNES, Atari, Genesis, Sega Master System, or PlayStation game you wanted. It could handle any of a dozen or more emulators–want to play Mario Kart 64 on your Xbox? No problem. Then there were the more, well, obviously rule-breaking elements of the software. It violated Microsoft’s terms of service–whether that’s illegal or just voids your warranty is unclear, but it is clear that Microsoft did not officially approve, since all XBMC Xboxes were banned from Xbox Live, the online multiplayer service. It wasn’t completely or even mostly legal, of course. By 2007, you could download BitTorrented videos right to your Xbox. You could restyle the whole thing, make it look however you wanted. ![]() You could snag TV and movie cover art from IMDb, or album art from AllMusic. It had apps, for weather and web browsing. ![]() By 2006, XBMC could play any kind of video or audio, from its hard drive, from bourgeoning internet sources like YouTube and, or from other computers on the network. Throughout the early- to mid-2000s, the open-source project attracted dozens of incredible developers, all contributing their own ideas and their own code, on their own time, for no money. On June 29th, 2004, the first stable release of XBMC appeared. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, Amazon: chumps. Dudes on XBMC messageboards going by names like “d7o3g4q” crafted something better than the biggest tech companies of the age could even dream of. Non-physical media was still riding horses, and XBMC was an illicit steam locomotive. This is three years before YouTube even existed. This is three years before iTunes sold videos and six years before Netflix Instant Watch debuted. Remember, BitTorrent had only been around for a year and was not widely used. You could download videos from P2P services like LimeWire and KazAa, but the selection was spotty, connections were slow, and you stood a pretty fair chance of snagging a virus by mistake. You rented DVDs, and you played them with DVD players. ![]() In 2002, you didn’t download video and you didn’t stream media of any sort, besides maybe photos. If you’ve had a Roku for years, it’s hard to explain how crazy this was, but ten years ago, that just didn’t happen. Ronen is the founder and CEO of Boxee, a company that’s poised to release the Boxee TV, a time-shifting, place-shifting streaming media box that could truly free us from the tyranny of the cable providers–though Ronen is very careful not to put it quite that way.īack in 2002, it could play back pictures, music, and videos from the optical drive, from the hard drive, or from computers on your network. That was the beginning of Ronen’s involvement with the internet, the start of the path that would eventually lead to a move from his native Israel to an airy, open, vaguely industrial office in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, complete with requisite friendly dog. “I immediately saw the potential of the internet,” Ronen told me, with about as much of a grin as I ever saw throughout our interviews. Somebody there showed him some nudie pics, doubtlessly downloaded with painful slowness, but nudie pics. In 1994, Avner Ronen was in the Israeli Defense Forces, stationed, he says, at the first place in the IDF with an internet-connected computer. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs.
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