I didn't say it was a failure just because of that. I have no idea how many the store has also sold and people have kept. Seeing that many returned though and still sitting on the shelf would make me suspicious that something was wrong, and I'd do a bit more research before just buying it at the store. I've never seen that high of a percentage of returned vs new products at Fry's before, so it was a bit surprising.

My only problem with the Boxee Box is that I currently lack a TV to attach it to :-) If I didn't already have an extra Mac Mini waiting for my future TV, the box might interest me for playing back videos off my ReadyNAS. I've had far better luck with just streaming off a share then I have over DLNA.

One big thing helping Roku is Netflix. For a while, they had an ad on the inside of the Netflix DVD mailers. That alone probably exposed more people to both the streaming service and the $60 box option.

On the AppleTV side, I'm curious to see how many end up in non home use. One of the really handy features coming soon will be expanded Airplay support including in apps like Keynote. At Vigil, we had a monthly company meeting where the different teams showed off their work, and it was always a traffic jam at the presenter controls as people swapped around, and they juggled between Photo Viewer, PowerPoint and Windows Media Player to show things off. All the managers there have iPads, so future presentations could just happen by each of them beaming their content to the TVs wirelessly.