Tom Daly was born in Brooklyn, but has been living and working in Rockland County as an interaction designer. Now he’ll be making the commute each day to work at Boxee on the future of web TV.
“I’ve been a Boxee user for a long time now, used their patch to hack my Apple TV back in the day,” says Daly. “I used to contribute to the forums and run into the Boxee guys at conference, so it’s a dream to get to work for them.”
The way Daly sees it the big battle right now is to perfect the social component of web TV. “I got my alpha invite this week for three new services that are all about making sure the content your friends are sharing gets equal weight with what’s on demand.”
Local start-ups like Shelby.tv and VHX are working on exactly this problem, and have been getting a lot of interest from investors.
“For a while the focus was all about bringing more content to Boxee,” says CEO Avner Ronen. “Now we are putting more emphasis on discovery and product as we move to new platforms like the iPad. Tom is a great product guy and we need more firepower.”
As an interaction designer, Daly’s goal is to craft a product with equal appeal to early adopters and mainstream noobs.”We need to get to the point where my parents can come over to watch my kids, pick up the remote and just get it. TV right now feels like its yelling at you the second you turn it on. It should be more like owning a cat than a dog. It’s all about easing the transition for people who are used to their TV sets barking at them all the time.”
