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December 9th, 2009, 15:57 GMT · By

The Boxee Box Is Apple TV’s Official Rival

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The Boxee box
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Boxee together with D-Link have introduced the Boxee Box. The device is similar to the Apple TV, in that it connects to your HDTV, but also different from the Apple TV, in that it plays pretty much everything you can get your hands on without having to justify any purchase, while no computer is needed.

“The Boxee Box brings all your favorite TV shows & movies from the Internet or your hard drive onto your TV,” the people developing the Boxee software say. “The Boxee Box plays any non-DRM media. Connecting the Boxee Box to your HDTV is as easy as hooking up a DVD player,” the company enumerates some of the key benefits.

Heading over to the Boxee blog, where Avner Ronen earlier announced the official Boxee beta, the Box is shown in all its glory. “So there’s been a lot of talk about the Boxee Box over the past 36 hours and we wanted to give you the ‘official’ version,” the piece reads.

“It was designed by Astro Studios, the team who crafted designs for the Xbox 360, watches from Nike, Alienware PCs. It’s being built by D-Link, the leading networking company for homes & small businesses. Working with D-Link means that we’ll be able to design, build, and release a Boxee Box at a low cost to a ton of etail and retail outlets,” it explains. “Soon, every device in your living room will connect to the Internet, and we hope Boxee will be the software that runs on them,” it concludes.

The specs include HDMI, WiFi, Optical Audio, Ethernet, RCA Audio, 2 USB, SD Cart Slot and RF Remote – more than enough to make people switch from Apple TV to this tiny, strangely shaped box no taller than a can of Coke. Best of all, the software it runs acts just like iTunes, only in a more open manner. The Boxee Box also gives access to more than just TV-related content. For example, university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations and more from TED, Stanford, Harvard, and FORA.tv are just a few sources the people behind Boxee pinpoint. You can visit Boxee here to have a closer look at its offerings.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: McDave on 20 Jan 2010, 11:03 UTC reply to this comment

The biggest difference between the two is that navigating AppleTV is logical and straight forward but navigating Boxee is, at best, bizarre! There's no differentiation between real, professional and amateur content and the apps just make the whole thing a total mess. The press laud it's backward compatibility with old MPEG4 part2-based video codecs (when we've all moved to part10 - H.264) & internet streaming - yup enjoy the stuttering when things get a bit too popular. As for the demos at CES of ripped files - aren't movies copy-right protected?

It does, however, give us a glimpse of the future of open home media devices - inconsistent, poorly designed, disjointed, messy & in all probability unlikely to take off. It's like the pointless confusion of the web - on your TV!!

McD

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