He also said that he's fine with $1.99 TV show episode sales, so that pretty much cements his view. $1.99 per episode? Ya, anyway.

Bruno, you asked if it bills your card immediately: it doesn't appear to.

It's going to be tough waiting a couple months for this thing. Fortunately, supposedly if you preorder you get it a little early. We'll see though. I've ordered two highly-sought gadgets this year (the Fitbit and the Square credit card reader). They both took almost five months to get to me (I just got the Square reader this morning!). I don't expect Boxee to take that long, since they're partnering with a real hardware vendor, but I'd be surprised if everything went smoothly with the launch...

The also announced Canadian pre-orders through Best Buy the other day, also at $199 which is nice. I'll probably put an order through soon and then we'll see how things go up here with early availability.


I was just reminded that back in 2007, NBC wanted $4.99 per TV episode which prompted them to pull all their content from iTunes. We know how that turned out.

NBC must think they're HBO or something.

Interesting teardown of the Boxee Box, looks like they are using the space the odd shape creates.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/24/boxee-box-on-display-at-fcc-inside-and-out/


As for the 99 cent rentals on the Apple TV, Viacom and CBS also have commented about it.



The odd thing to me about the Viacom comments is that I already get 16 episodes of the Daily Show for $9.99 via iTunes, and thats to keep. 16 episodes works out to around one month, due to the Monday-Thursday schedule.

So far here's a small list of my Boxee show-stoppers. I don't think I'll buy a Boxee Box until they get resolved (in order of importance for me):

• Can't forward/reverse skip multiple times in a row on local video - simply freezes up playback for a while, this means it's impossible to fast-forward through your video at any rate.
  
• Articles, including the definite article ("the") not ignored when sorting titles. This is an egregious bug, IMO, and it's simply inexcusable that it's still around in the latest software versions. There are currently no plans to support this!

Other important issues, but wouldn't stop me from picking up the box:

• Direct-to-video releases are not able to be indexed by Boxee, even if you can find them in the manual-correction lookup. This affects all those Disney sequels, lots of comedian's DVD, etc... Currently there are no plans to even support this.

It appears to me that they're concentrating mainly on the online-content rather that putting much work into the local library management and playback. That has me worried for the future, especially since local playback is 100% of my interest in Boxee.

Clearly, none of these are showstoppers for me, as I've already preordered the box (which I don't appear to have been charged for yet, FYI).

#1 - I'll check that out for you when I get my Boxee Box and let you know if it happens on the finished product. Who knows, maybe it's different.

#2 - That is a dumb bug, and they should want to fix it, but it doesn't bother me too much, certainly not as much as it does you...

#3 - Again, doesn't bother me much because I can't think of anything I watch that's direct to video...

Ok, here's #4 egregious design flaw with boxee.... I agree with the poster on the boxee forum, this is maddening.



The "MY...." categories/lists are supposed to be your actual local collections. Except for the TV category it seems. Boxee will also show random online sourced episodes mixed into what you have locally. And they're truly random, it doesn't show you all the episodes you're missing, just some hodge podge list. And there's no way to tell which are local and which are online, nor where the online content is sourced from, until you actually go play them! Not to mention the online stuff might come in at 200x100 resolution while all your other stuff is 720 or 1080p.

Apart from completely corrupting what should be a list of your personal media, Boxee's flawed online additions also show incorrect season numbers, incorrect episode names, duplicate episodes, wrong episode numbers, duplicate numbers, numbers out of order, content which is not allowed to be played in the current region, content that is allowed but simply won't play, etc.

Maddening - to say the least.

But, Boxee is still the only game in town. Everything else out there really really sucks in every way, especially when you give those products more than a quick glance. Even WD's new box shipping tomorrow seems like a huge bag of fail.

I've had this complaint since first using the Boxee software on my computer too. I really don't know why they don't at least give you the option to turn off sourcing from internet providers.

But still, not enough to keep me from the product. Hopefully it'll start shipping soon... It does worry me a tiny bit that they claim a ship date of "November," when that month is getting very close. I would hope that by now they'd have a more firm date.

It's the end of November from what I've seen on the Canadian pre-order page at Best-Buy.

I thought about blocking a URL to prevent those episodes from showing up, but the only URL that Boxee needs to hit for adding those items is also the URL it needs to hit to know it's online and use its apps. The URL is owned by Amazon and registered by Amazon Legal Dept.

The other issues that I have with it are that you can't easily make corrections if Boxee doesn't want you to. You're limited by what IMDB provides and how Boxee has tied into them. So you can't supply your own artwork, etc. IMO, the thing should have been implemented such that any metadata you have, including artwork, could override what it pulls from the net.

I don't really care about online media and all of my content is stored on a server locally. I wouldn't come close to saying that Boxee is the only game in town (unless you're talking about purchasing something off the shelf, which I didn't) and I'd actually go so far as to say Boxee is a non-contender for my attention based on the beta version I used.

Off-the-shelf there's nothing that comes close to what Boxee offers for local media, even with all its faults. Popcorn Hour's latest product, PopBox "looked" like it might be half-way decent, but like every other product they've released it in fact sucks very very badly and is missing so many basic playback features that it would be all but unusable. The Western Digital boxes are fine for playing back a single file out of a directory of files. But that's not what I'm looking for.

With Roll-Your-Own, there are more options, however I still don't think any other software out there has the finish and polish of Boxee. For instance, I haven't seen a skin for XBMC that I've liked yet - I can honestly say that all the time I've spent looking at XBMC has just left me completely underwhelmed and not impressed in the least. I haven't seen anything that I've liked at all about it. Plex for Mac OS, also based on XBMC has some potential, but it's still lacking.

Building out a box to run Plex or XBMC would still be at least a $400+ proposition as well. I already think Boxee Box is $50 too expensive.

On related news... Apple has shipped over 250000 new AppleTVs in 18 days. Not huge compared to their other debut products, but much higher than I expected. We'll see how some of these studio execs start singing now...

And we'll see if Boxee supports the new AppleTV. They supported the old one.

WARNING: Necro-bump.

We picked up one of these. It works reasonable well, and a lot better then plugging the laptop into TV and using that. For $99 it is a no brainer, so I sent one to my sister in Ireland, and it was plug & play, just needed a physical adapter for the power supply - which is mico-USB (or is it mini-USB?) so it could be fed of a TV's USB port as well.
For my mother we did try a laptop, but her tech skill are not that good (insert rant about dreadful UI in Skype on Windows), so she recently picked up a 2nd gen iPad, which is within her tech skills.

Clever. What's the UI for that thing? I could imagine how a Chromecast variant on this theme could be attractive, using your phone for the UI rather than yet another remote control.

You'd also kinda think that somebody would support a USB webcam plugged into a GoogleTV box, but I don't think there is such a thing. Given the apparently unexpected success of Chromecast, Google presumably has a 2nd-gen version of the product in the works, and support for external video cameras would be a seemingly obvious addition.

From this review I stole this image:

This is what you see once you've got it connected to the internet (on first connect it will did an update) and then connect it to you Skype account.

If memory serves me right there was a webcam option for the Logitech Revue, I think it only worked with a very limited set of webcams, maybe only one. Typical webcams today do very little processing, all that is handled by the computer they are attached to, after all there is plenty of horsepower there, so let the computer and the software do the work. Which in part is likely why the Revue only worked with some cameras, the ones that did the work. The camera I've linked to is fully self contained, requiring only ethernet (hard or wifi), HDMI out, and micro-USB for power.

My only concern is that this product is EOL from Logitech, and that too soon for my liking it will become a brick due to changes in Skype, that Logitech don't update the firmware to account for. A similar competing product is this from Tely Labs telyHD. And there are also some Smart TVs that support their own brand webcam, but that ties you to that TV brand, and they are a $100 to $200 add-on.

Given the horsepower in the Amazon Fire TV they could support a webcam, that I suppose it is a question of how Amazon would monetize the feature, after all it is not going to encourage me to buy more products