Boxee Box often falls in the shadow of other more popular (and more affordable) set-top boxes like Apple TV and those from Roku.
However, the addition of Spotify might give the set-top box (which isn’t really shaped much a like a box) an edge. The new optimized app is available for Boxee Box owners immediately.
The online music streaming service recently dropped the invite, opening the digital doors to a hugely larger potential audience. Since debuting in the United States this summer, Spotify had roughly 1.5 million paid and unpaid users by early August, and reportedly 250,000 paid subscribers in the U.S. alone as of Friday. Additionally, the London-based company has an estimated value of $1.1 billion now.
It looks like a sweet coup for Boxee Box, but it’s also a major play for Spotify. For the most part, Spotify has been tethered to desktop/laptop computers running Mac or Windows, along with mobile devices running Android and iOS.
Most major music and video on-demand services have spread their coverage to the majority of home entertainment, living room gadgets — primarily Internet-connected HDTVs, gaming consoles and set-top boxes. On the music side, just look at Pandora, Rhapsody and Sony’s Music Unlimited for starters.
Spotify is still behind in this arena for the most part, although it has also recently debuted on the WD TV player.
Yet Spotify deserves a little time (but only a little) to catch up to the competition because it is still quite new in the U.S. But once Spotify does see its way onto more devices, the more valuable that $10 monthly subscription will be.
Thus, if Spotify moves quickly (but without being reckless and producing rushed apps), then we could be seeing record numbers for digital music subscriptions based on the membership sign-up rates we’ve seen thus far.
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