14 DAY TRIAL // Back in December, during a time when 3D was rearing its head and technology was preparing to make a downward leap in physical size, Boxee came forth and announced a very ambitious plan to create an all-purpose set top box that can act as a sort of all-in-one media streaming solution. The main goal was to design the Boxee Box, a compact, quite affordable electronic that would not only perform regular TV streaming tasks, but would also be able to handle HD media stored on USB devices or the local network, among other things. Even social network integration was planned.
Late in 2009, Boxee said the device would come out sometime during the first half of the ongoing year. Needless to say, that period is almost over, which naturally means that something did not occur as planned. Boxee representative Avner Ronen thus decided it was time for a blog post.
Avner explained that, as was suspected, the deadline would not be met. Instead, Boxee intends to finalize all preparations by November. In the meantime, the so-called software-related issues that are behind the delay will be resolved. As for the hardware itself, the company won't make any modifications, which means NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC will have its work cut out for it.
Boxee did not specifically say what the actual issues were, but Engadget suspects Adobe Flash 10.1 is the main factor. The Boxee Box will rely heavily on this feature but the specification itself was unleashed just days ago.
“Earlier this week we got confirmation that the Boxee Box by D-Link will ship this November in US and Canada. [...] The original plan was to have the Box out by the end of Q2 (i.e. just about now), but that time-frame proved overly ambitious. [...] The goal is to play HD videos from the web or a local network in 1080p and use hardware acceleration whenever possible. [...] Not to mention making all this happen for an affordable price and on a quiet device that will not feel obsolete 12 months after you buy it,” said Avner Ronen.