Peter Sunde, whom you may know as one of the guys who created The Pirate Bay, is launching a new micropayment system called Flattr. Above, a video explaining how it works. "Many large streams will form a river."

The idea is to balance between free and paid, between being open and closed, and earn revenue from both advertising and charging for content.

The details are still being worked out, but Boxee will charge a small fee for the transactions (the plan is to charge less than the 30% that many other app stores and content ecosystems charge). By doing this, Boxee is, in their words, “[tying] our success as a business to the success of our partners.”Having micro-payments built into Boxee has huge implications for the platform as a whole. Right now, the only downside of a system like Boxee is that although more and more partners are signing up to offer content through the service or offer an enhanced experience, when it comes to getting movies or TV shows that are accessible through platforms like iTunes or VUDU or CinemaNow, users are out of luck. This gives Boxee as a platform the opportunity to offer those enhanced options.