Boxee breaks away from AppleTV, announces their own Boxee Box
3:18 am, December 9th, 2009, John Brownlee
The AppleTV was a bizarre misstep for Cupertino, and judging by how they’ve consistently ignored the device since it launched, Apple damn well seems to know it. Popular AppleTV media software suite Boxee seem to too: they have just announced their own competing set-top media player for release in 2010.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a set-top media player, and the market’s full of excellent ones, but Apple’s execution was flawed: the AppleTV was just a giant iPod that connected to your television. That made it beautifully simple to use, but at the expense of what people want: consumers want more options got watching video on their televisions than just piping in paid-for iTunes content. They want codec support, and an expanding library of online video sites, like Hulu.com.
The only way I’ve ever found my AppleTV to be usable was by installing Boxee on it. Suddenly, my AppleTV wasn’t just an iTunes-kiosk, but a fully functioning media player, with broad codec support, an intuitive interface and a large library of supported Internet sites. In fact, I loved Boxee so much, I quickly realized that my 40GB AppleTV was just holding Boxee back, and invested in a home theater PC, just to run the program. My AppleTV now sits atop my Time Capsule, unused except as a method to automatically sync my girlfriend’s iTunes collection when she brings her laptop through the door.
I’m not the only one who realized the AppleTV was just keeping Boxee down: Boxee have too. They’ve just announced their own set-top box to compete with the AppleTV, charmingly called the Boxee Box. Partnering with D-Link, the Boxee Box offers HDMI, SPDIF and RCA Audio connection, USB 2.0 support, and can quickly connect to a home network using 802.11n WiFi or wired ethernet to slurp up your media files. It will ship in the first half of 2010, for an undisclosed price. No word on hard drive capacity either, but it’ll obviously come with storage capacity greatly exceeding the AppleTV’s own, paltry 160GBs.
The Boxee Box might not be as sexy as the AppleTV, but it’s bound to be a far better product for an equivalent price. Of course, if your entertainment center is an altar to Apple’s design motifs, you could also just upgrade your AppleTV’s hard drive and install the Boxee software for about the same price. Either’ll get you there.
Posted by John Brownlee in AppleTV, Hardware | Comment on this article
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Boxee link in third paragraph links to boxee.com, shouldn’t it be boxee.tv?
Douglas Drumond, on December 9th, 2009 at 3:58 am
I wouldn’t call this “breaking away.” Boxee will still run on an AppleTV, after all.
It was pretty obvious from the get go that they were going to do their own hardware: it’s the only real potential revenue channel they have and revenue is, you know, IMPORTANT.
They’re going to regret that design, cool though it may be. You can’t stack anything on top of it and it won’t fit in slim spaces. Epic fail.
Darcy McGee, on December 9th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Wrong link to Boxee. This is the right one:
http://www.boxee.tv/
th.
t.lo, on December 9th, 2009 at 9:13 am
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love my AppleTV. I installed Boxee at one point, and found it to be utterly useless: horrible UI, confusing menus, poor quality… and without Hulu there wasn’t really much I even wanted to watch on it.
My AppleTV, however, is used on a daily basis for my movies, tv shows and music. Maybe I’m just not a huge tv-phile… who knows. But AppleTV does the job, and does it beautifully.
If Apple can work in a tv show rental/subscription plan, I’d happily give up cable.
Jason, on December 9th, 2009 at 10:03 am
I love my Apple TV! Mr. Brownlee, I humbly submit that you’re on crack.
Andrew Robulack, on December 9th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I’ve got two Apple TVs and both run Boxee. If you’ve spent the time and energy ripping and recoding several hundred DVDs into x264 video files on a server, ATV simply doesn’t work as the set-top box for your media collection without Boxee. Show iTunes a 2 TB media collection and it’ll pass out from the surprise. ATV really works best with all the content stored locally. iTunes’ streaming implementation is brain-dead, and none of it scales to large libraries.
Caveat empor – even with Boxee, ATV can’t play hi-def content. I have to recode all my blu-rays to 540p to get them to play on my ATV. It’s a lightweight in the CPU dept and just can’t render full HD content. Occasionally it’ll play a 720p video without massive stuttering, but to be on the safe side, go with 540p.
All in all, for $300, others can (and have) done better. Apple had a nice concept, and a sexy product, but the weak hardware and the dependency on iTunes crippled the poor ATV. Boxee fixes the iTunes related snafu, but the hardware is still DOA.
Aaron D., on December 11th, 2009 at 2:34 pm