The good folks at Boxee held quite a launch event tonight in NYC for the new BoxeeBox
by D-Link. Those who pre-ordered from Amazon.com are reporting their devices started arriving this morning. According to the launch event, it will also be at major U.S. retail stores by Nov 17 (and reports from the great white north say its already on the shelves at Best Buy stores in Canada).Major announcements at the event:
A very nicely revised user interface which looks great and has an AMAZING new search function to find just about any video, show, or movie "on the interwebs" (to quote Avner Ronon).
Currently only available on the BoxeeBox but coming soon for Windows, Mac, etc.
NetFlix will be on the BoxeeBox by the end of the year and...in HD!
Hulu Plus will also be on the BoxeeBox (no date announced)
Other cool content sources on BoxeeBox:
Vudu's 9,000+ titles in HD (starting at $2.00 for 2 nights)
I kept saying I was waiting until NetFlix is on it, but I may just get one anyway now that its officially announced that NetFlix will be available on the BoxeeBox! I need a content source on a second TV (we fired DirecTV about 3 months ago and refuse to pay $100 per month for cable or satelitte). BoxeeBox will work perfectly for the second TV.
I doubt that I'll be ditching the HTPC I'm running Boxee on in the living room, though. That's working great, and as soon as the 1.0 software is available, it will actually have more than the boxee box (except the cool remote) since the computer version will run NetFlix today. Plus, its the computer that has all of our DVD's, Music, and Pictures on it anyway so it may as well also be the Boxee computer for the living room while its at it.
Congratulations Avner and team!
I'm curious, what HTPC are you using in your living room? I'm trying to decide between a HTPC and a Boxee Box.
ReplyDeleteI'm using a 4 year old HP machine that originally came with windows XP. It has 2 gig of RAM, and an nvidia video card which is also 4 years old.
ReplyDeleteIt is running windows 7 and Boxee.
Boxee really doesn't need a ton of horsepower so you could probably use almost any modern pc.
For the money you can't beat the BoxeeBox though.
I will likely keep my old HP running Boxee on the main TV though since it also acts as the server for my mp4 and mp3 collection.
When I get my BoxeeBox it will go either in the den or the master bedroom.
I will also eventually be upgrading the CPU and motherboard in the pc, though, as I do want more horsepower for PlayON to do transcoding on the same machine.