This enthusiastic review covers the exciting announcement that the long-awaited Boxee Box media player finally became available for pre-order on Amazon for $199, with shipping scheduled for November 2010. The post provides complete coverage of this important moment in home theater PC (HTPC) history, when Boxee was positioned as a game-changing solution for streaming content to televisions.
The article dives deep into what made Boxee special as a media platform, highlighting its beautiful, user-friendly interface that could stream Flash content directly to HDTVs - something that was game-changing at the time. Patrick Bisch explains how Boxee automatically recognizes local video and music files, then enhances them with metadata like album art and movie posters pulled from the internet, creating a polished entertainment experience. The post also covers practical features like the iPhone remote app that let users control their Boxee setup wirelessly, plus the social networking aspects that allowed friends to see what others were watching and share recommendations.
The timing couldn't have been more interesting, as the Boxee Box was launching into direct competition with Apple's newly announced $99 Apple TV and Google's upcoming Google TV platform, all set to arrive within three months of each other just before the holiday season. The author also mentions a important last-minute hardware change from NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processor to Intel's Atom CE4100 due to H.264 video codec compatibility issues, showing the technical challenges these early streaming devices faced.
Looking back 15 years later, this post captures a pivotal moment in the evolution of home entertainment technology. The Boxee Box represented an early attempt to bridge the gap between computers and televisions, predating the streaming device wars that would eventually be dominated by platforms like Roku, Apple TV, and Chromecast. While Boxee itself eventually faded from the market, this era laid important groundwork for today's streaming ecosystem where multiple devices compete to deliver internet content to our living rooms, and the concept of cord-cutting has become mainstream.
This summary was created by Dave Rogers. The original post was written by Patrick Bisch and published on September 14, 2010.
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