Friday, November 12, 2010

Boxee Box Has Arrived

Boxee Box

The first reports of people receiving their Boxee Box started yesterday right after the Boxee Event.  Boxee wants to play with the big boys like GoogleTV and AppleTV and announced Netflix support coming “this year” and Hulu Plus

Thursday Boxee officially unveiled their Boxee Box, a non-PVR HTPC streaming, set top box built by D-Link.  The big news in the announcement was that shipments have begun already (many have already received theirs) and Netflix & Hulu Plus support is on its way.

Boxee Box Hardware

The Boxee Box is built on an Atom-based platform much like Logitech Revue GoogleTV. 

iFixIt had a teardown of the Boxee Box on launch day (check out the teardown at iFixIt here.)

Boxee Box Inside

Inside you find:

  • Intel Atom CE4110 SOC processor
  • Wolfson WM8524G stereo DAC
  • AKM 8137A multi-clock generator
  • Nanya 1035 NT5CB128MCN-CG 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM (1/2 total RAM capacity)
  • RealTek RTL8201N 10/100 Ethernet PHYceiver
  • FE1.1 USB 2.0 HUB LG3A924A6180
  • 1 GB NAND Flash
  • Microchip PIC24FJ64GA004-I/PT 16-bit flash microcontroller
  • 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM (1/2 total RAM capacity)

Netflix & Hulu Plus Coming

Boxee provides access to many online sources like VUDU (SD only), Vimeo, YouTube and others – much like GoogleTV and others.  Boxee apps work on the box and it allows access to content to your local network and storage devices as well.

Boxee seems to have given in to the fact they can’t get official content support and still allow things like unauthorized streaming of Hulu and torrents – things that make those content providers edgy.  And so they seem to have worked out agreements with Netflix for official support on the box before 2010 ends (we’ll see if they’re able to meet that promise) and Hulu Plus sometime soon (read: Hulu deal isn’t all worked out yet so I say 2011).  Both great additions, but similar to many other devices by the time they get both of those providers online.

I see the Boxee box as a great alternative to the AppleTV and GoogleTV if your focus is on video content on your local network and streaming content available on Boxee.  I’ve decided to hold off on reviewing the Boxee Box for now though – perhaps if they add TV tuning at some point…  We should see a full review at ZatzNotFunny! before long though.

You can order a Boxee Box at Amazon now for $199 

More info on the Official Boxee Blog

Did you get a Boxee Box?  Let us know how you like it in the comments!