last100 » Boxee

More details on the Boxee Box – geeks and early adopters need only apply

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:31:26 +0000

We knew it was coming (it was semi-announced in December) but now more details of the Boxee set-top box have been unveiled. Most interesting is the price point – $200 – and the way Boxee and hardware partner D-Link are pitching the device. From the press release:

D-Link made lots of geeks and early adopters happy today by introducing the revolutionary Boxee Box by D-Link, winner of the CES Best of Innovations award in the Home Entertainment category.

The Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Note the “geeks” and “early adpoters” reference, perhaps admission that the set-top box is a niche device and isn’t expected to sell in the bucket load. Instead, it could still be that Boxee’s living room future lies not in consumer facing set-top boxes – the Boxee Box itself or competitor offerings such as those from Roku or the newly announced Popbox – but in licensing its software to existing cable and telco companies B2B style. Or perhaps bypassing the set-top box altogether and building Boxee into Internet-connected TVs, although again that’s a direct consumer play and faces similar challenges as a consumer facing set-top.

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Roku launches app store for its set-top box – adds Flickr, Facebook, Pandora and others

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:53:48 +0000

Roku’s $100 set-top box (U.S.-only) just got even more compelling. The company has launched its own app store of sorts – called the ‘Channel Store’ – that brings a growing number of third-party content sources to the device including Pandora (music streaming) Facebook photos, Flickr (photo sharing), along with FrameChannel, Mediafly’s podcast directory, Revision3 and more. Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny has a few screen grabs and a nifty walk-through video (embedded above). The new content ‘widgets’ join existing partnerships with Netflix, Amazon VOD, and MLB.TV.

Of course, everybody is jumping on the app store or “I want to be a platform game” and it’s a smart move for Roku to do so too. But they are far from the first set-top box to ‘open up’ and go down the app store route. Vudu already has its Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform, which enables third-parties to extend the device’s content offerings, and Boxee, while not officially on a set-top box yet (coming soon), also has its own Internet TV-oriented app store.

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Boxee set-top box on its way – let the connected living room battle begin

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:31:23 +0000

Boxee, the socially driven and feisty Internet TV browser, will soon land on a set-top box of its own. Currently the media center software is only available on Mac, Windows, Linux, along with a hacked together version for the AppleTV (the closest that Boxee has come so far to appearing on a set-top box). That’s about to change, says the company.

Founder and CEO Avner Ronen writes on the official Boxee blog: “I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.”

More details on the box itself will be revealed at an upcoming Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, NY on Dec 7th.

Of course we already knew that the company was working hard to get its software onto an array of hardware, from set-top boxes, Internet TVs, Blu-ray players, and game consoles etc. In other words, Boxee wants to remain device agnostic and, eventually, be everywhere. Or as Ronen writes: “Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room.”

Aah.

The battle for the connected living room you say.

That’s the same fight that Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Sony and a long list of others are participating in. Boxee may have a great user experience and a smart third-party app strategy, but to win that battle they’ll need their fair share of luck.

Or to be acquired but one of the bigger players.

Just sayin’

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Boxee grows up with official Major League Baseball streaming partnership

Steve O'Hear — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:40:39 +0000

Major League Baseball on Boxee

Forget the ongoing spat with Hulu, PC-to-TV media player Boxee has announced an official partnership with MLB.com.

Subscribers to the MLB.TV Premium can now use Boxee to pipe content from the service, which includes “live and on-demand in HD (where available)”, to their TVs or simply enjoy Boxee’s ‘ten foot’ and remote control-friendly UI on their PC. On that note, MLB.TV Premium offers DVR functionality to pause and rewind a live game.

Going forward, Boxee hopes this is the first of such partnerships, as live sport is bound to be seen as a major driver of uptake for Internet TV solutions such as Boxee.

MLB.com represents a big step for boxee as we hope this is the first of many different live sports offerings we can bring to you. We hope other sports follow MLB.com’s lead of giving fans a choice of how they enjoy watching their favorite teams…. [Boxee blog]

The company also announced that a version of Boxee, albeit in Alpha, is now available for Windows along with existing versions for Mac OSX and Linux.

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Boxee announces ‘app dev challenge’ (get coding, people)

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:02:45 +0000

It seems like everybody and their dog wants to be a platform these days, and media center software Boxee is no exception. (That’s a good thing by the way.) However, providing the hooks needed to write third-party applications is probably the easy part (relatively speaking), while attracting developers to the platform can be a little harder. Build it and they will come hardly ever applies.

On that note, Boxee have announced the ‘Boxee app challenge‘ in an attempt to provide a little extra incentive for developers. Not only are a bunch of prizes up for grabs for the best apps created up, but the Internet TV startup also promises to shine a little light on entrants along the way.

From the official Boxee blog:

the boxee dev challenge will have 3 categories: Video, Music and Photos.
in each category we will have a People’s Choice award and a Judge’s Choice award:

People’s Choice Award: Drobo
Judge’s Choice Award: Sony Bravia XBR9 46″

the deadline for submitting your application is June 14th at 11:59pm PT, but we encourage you to submit early and often as we’ll be talking up cool applications as they come in.
voting will take place between June 15th – June 22nd.

The judging panel includes Veronica Belmont (Tekzilla, Qore), Ryan Block (GDGT, former Editor-In-Chief Engadget) and the company’s own CEO Avner Ronen. The winning apps will be announced on June 23rd at a Boxee event in San Francisco.

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Boxee releases remote control iPhone app

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:54:10 +0000

Another ‘remote control’ app has landed on iPhone, this time for media center software Boxee. The Boxee Remote app works over WiFi and operates in two modes: ‘Gesture’ and ‘Buttons’. In Gesture mode users drag the Boxee logo around the screen to trigger up, down, left and right and clicking on the logo activates play/pause. Alternatively, Button mode offers up a virtual version of Apple’s own hardware-based remote control, which although less imaginative is probably more practical. Either way, the free app is very bare bones, making it all the more baffling that, according to Boxee, Apple took such a long time to approve it.

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Hulu blocks Boxee, could Firefox, IE and Safari be next?

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:50:28 +0000

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

The news that Hulu has asked Boxee to remove access to its content is ridiculous on many levels.

Not least is the fact that, in relation to Hulu, technically speaking Boxee is just a web browser that happens to be optimized for a ‘ten foot’ or TV-like viewing experience rather than for when you’re sat directly in front of the PC. And crucially, since Boxee has yet to license its software to set-top box makers or build a box of its own, the only way to get Boxee content onto a TV is via a PC (aside from running Boxee on a hacked AppleTV). Once the PC is using the TV as its monitor, any content can be displayed on the television, including using a standard web browser such as Firefox, IE or Safari to access Hulu or any online video site. All Boxee has done is design a better browsing experience for when you’re sat further away. In other words, Boxee alone doesn’t enable Hulu to be viewed on the TV, it just makes it more convenient.

In terms of the business case, Boxee hasn’t done anything wrong either. It doesn’t remove the ads that are embedded in Hulu content, no does it run ads of its own. Its only crime, as already stated, is that Boxee has made it more convenient to view television content on a PC connected to a TV. Oh the irony.

Hulu says its not their fault that they’ve had to block Boxee, but it’s at the request of content owners who license their content to the site. What they’re afraid of, it seems, is that if television content online can be conveniently piped back to the TV, users may cancel their cable TV subscriptions or equivalents altogether. This, of course, is happening already – thanks to the Internet – and stopping Boxee alone won’t hold back the tide. The Boxee software is cool an all but it ain’t that revolutionary :-)

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