Boxee Box for Your TV, Beta Software Unveiled
By David Worthington | Monday, December 7, 2009 at 8:29 pm
A rowdy crowd of 650 gathered at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn for Boxee’s highly anticipated unveiling of its set top box tonight.
Boxee creates open source software that brings on-demand content from the Internet and home networks to TVs, and while the software has just reached beta, it is enlisting hardware partners to embed it on their devices. (Until now, it’s been available for OS X, Windows, Linux, and as a hack for Apple TV.) Â The $200 Boxee Box is the company’s first branded hardware device, manufactured by D-Link. It will become available in the second quarter of next year.
The Box is cube shaped, and is almost as tall as a soda can. It comes equipped with built-in Wi-Fi, and attaches to TVs through HDMI, optical cables, or even RCA cables. The display is 1080p.
Openness is a central theme of the Box: It is built to be expanded and modified. SD slots and USB ports allow users to attach external storage, as well as Web cams and other devices. Boxee is also encouraging developers to extend its software, and will provide APIs for tinkering with it.
Additionally, a private beta of Boxee was launched today, and several partners joined Boxee on stage to show up their applications. New content providers on the software include Clicker, The Escapist, and Suicide Girls. And students from New York University demonstrated a program called Trend Lines, which filters content based upon what topics are trending online.
Boxee has updated its software to work with Microsoft’s DirectX multimedia APIs, and is creating a 64-bit installation for Ubuntu Linux. Other changes include a streamlined user interface, as well as extended social networking capabilities.
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September 13th, 2010 at 7:30 am[…] at 7:30 am on Monday, September 13, 2010 What a difference a year makes. When Boxee and D-Link unveiled the Boxee Box  in late 2009, things were pretty quiet on the Internet-TV-in-the-living-room front. Now, after a bit of a delay, […]
March 30th, 2011 at 12:43 am
Fast forward to 2011 and I do not hear of the set top box very often. Is this due to majority of user upgrading, or is the market saturated.
April 1st, 2011 at 2:21 am
It also looks as if the box has a memory card slot on the side there. Is that what it is? Would make video loading more convenient I suppose. Overall, it's a nifty and fashionable design.
July 10th, 2011 at 5:36 am
Am I right that Boxee is the best thing you can have? 🙂
I love it!
July 10th, 2011 at 9:02 am
Boxee for ever! 🙂
August 11th, 2011 at 9:27 am
A friend of mine recently purchased one of these and won't stop talking about it, and I can see why. It's such a great piece of technology, I can't figure out why it's taken so long for something like this to come about.