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Content aggregation has been instrumental in the development of the web. In the early days of the web, destinations held all the power. If you wanted news or reviews you went to news and review sites, consuming the content they had to offer at each individual website. Email newsletters were the first to really change the manner in which content was consumed online. Instead of visiting a website to read the latest it had to offer, you got an email in your inbox with either complete content or enough of a teaser for you to decide whether or not you were interested in it.
These days we have many more ways to get access to written content on the web than a simple newsletter. There's RSS, Twitter and Instapaper among others. It generally works well. RSS didn't stop users from visiting websites, neither did Twitter and Instapaper hasn't spelled the end of the front page either. If anything all of these technologies have helped make consuming content online easier. While the front page of any website today isn't quite as big of an example of prime real estate as it was 10 years ago, it's still quite valuable.
I mention this history for one important reason: we haven't seen the same progress with aggregating and distributing television content on the web. These days you can find a lot of cable TV content on the web, usually posted the day after the shows air live on cable TV. All of the major networks support it. Visit Fox.com, NBC.com or CBS.com and you'll be greeted with ways to watch all of the shows they air via the web. The content is all out there, and it wouldn't be too difficult to aggregate it all into one cable-TV-like interface. In theory, with what's posted online already, you could pull the plug on cable and just rely on video over the web without missing much. It's just not quite as easy as a cable subscription with a DVR. This is where Boxee comes in.
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