Boxee to Build a Dedicated Media Center Device

For a while now, media center enthusiasts have had a great option in Boxee, a software and service package which makes watching online videos on a TV a breeze. But, for the most part, it took a bit of fiddling to set up the service, keeping most people away from it except for the most dedicated. This may change soon enough, though, as the company has announced it would launch its own dedicated hardware device not too far in the future.

Boxee is currently available for Windows, Linux, and Mac and most people built dedicated machines to run the software. Anyway, this was both hard to do for the less experienced and a more expensive option to buying a set-top box. Its extensive list of features and supported services got several hardware manufacturers interested and the company is now saying it will reveal a dedicated device as soon as December 7 when the software will also shed its alpha status.

It won't have the real hardware for the beta unveiling, but it will show mock-ups of the upcoming device as well as reveal more details about the hardware specs and possibly who their partner for the device will be. For now though, Boxee is keeping quiet about the hardware manufacturer.

“We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device,” Boxee CEO Avner Ronen announced on the company blog. “I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.”

Eventually, Boxee wants to give users multiple options for getting the experience to the living room, be it with web-enabled TVs, set-top boxes, games consoles, and even the trusty PC. However, an important step will be launching this first dedicated device, which is expected to come in the first half of 2010 in the $99 to $199 price range.