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.
