New Boxee box revealed with DVR / builtin tuner - Page 3

Their good friends at Comcast will love having more customers break through their data download caps. Ka-Ching....
Edited by Dmon4u - 10/16/12 at 12:24pm

Something tells me you are actually not recording to the cloud. boxee will record the show for you, and you just view it. This is why the service is not available everywhere, they have to get set up in that market.

Could be... like what Aereo is doing (and getting into legal trouble with).

I wonder how long it is going to take before Boxee Box files for bankruptcy.

This is clearly not the box I'm looking for.

Also, as I've already asked on Boxees blog - does this mean Boxee is pulling out of all Worldwide markets? They're discontinuing the Boxee Box, but they're only releasing Boxee TV in the US (and Canada, I'm guessing).

In any case, I think it's about time to sell my Boxee Box. I have to admit it's been a disappointment. So much potential, but I'm clearly not the kind of customer they wanted. To be honest, it hasn't gotten that much use either. I've also got a Dune, and a PC running XBMC, so the last year or so, I've only used the Boxee Box sporadically to check if a new firmware has solved any issues or not.

I kinda knew that it was geared mostly at online content when I bought it, though. But I thought it would be "good enough" for local content, and hoped that it would eventually support other formats I needed "i.e. BD iso). So I guess I'm more disappointed than angry about the way they've ignored local content.

Is it? I thought DD+ was practically identical to DD, except it allows for a higher bitrate.

I agree with you that Boxee Box had great potential. I would of been happy if they had fixed the sound issues.

It's more efficient than DD. Plus it is also an advanced codec. You need HDMI 1.3 or higher to use DD+, just like DTS-MA, DTS-HD, and Dolby TrueHD.

https://www.simple.tv/

SimpleTV for $149 and about $5 a month for EPG plus you record to your own hard drive plus you can stream recordings to your apps and browsers anywhere plus stream live TV to you mobile devices. Why would I pay $15 for cloud service as opposed to the media sitting on your very own hard drive and only in select cities to start? I don't get what Boxee is doing. I like the SimpleTV model as an OTA compliment to my local streaming setup (Plex). Boxee has lost their marbles.

You've got to be kidding - upload, on a regular basis, files that can be 8GB or more just so you can watch them? And pay $15 a month for the privilege? And run up against caps, either now or upcoming? What are they smoking?

Even if they transcode to mp4 on the fly you're still talking 4GB or more files for longer shows, unless they decrease the quality to the point where it's nowhere good as broadcast. And we all know that broadcast quality is not that good now to begin with.

If they really wanted to provide a DVR on the cheap, they should've told folks to go out and get an external drive and we'll format and use it for recordings. But at $15/mo. they're going down the Tivo road with no marketplace name to speak of, and Tivo has had a hard enough time keeping the business themselves. And it doesn't do Cablecard anyway, so what is your $15 buying you? Local clear QAM or antenna channels right now, and that's it. You get the full set with a Tivo and a monthly sub at the same price. AFAIK the cableCos agreed to provide IP access for basic cable in return for full encryption, not to provide an alternative to Cablecard.
Edited by slowbiscuit - 10/17/12 at 8:47am

Also, this is a great captive revenue stream for Boxee. They can jack up their fee anytime they want. What you gonna do .....move your recordings elsewhere ?

SimpleTV will let you record and playback even without paying them a dime for any service.

Can I connect the SimpleTV to a TV? I looked at it, it seems like it can stream to computer devices (ipad, pc, etc), but not display it on an actual TV..

Could possibly be a dud but they just starting shipping or will start soon so the jury is still out as to what it's performance out in the wild. At least the recorded material is stores locally. Before you say crap concerning SimpleTV shouldn't you wait for a BoxeeTV review so you can say crap, crap.

As far as I can tell, the Roku Channel for Simple.TV is not yet finalized. I also read a few months ago that they will have a Media Center version perhaps by next year.

I' m going to watch both Boxee and Simple.TV reviews for a long while till I make a final choice.

I see the recent and surprising BoxeeTV left turn announcement going DVR doesn't sit well with you. It put a burr under your saddle and we can tell. Seriously, I was looking at SimpleTV months ago to replace my older HDHomeRun and SageTV set up. My point was that I see two advantages with SimpleTV (if it turns out to work). One, it's cheaper, two, it records to local. I also like the fact that they plan to bring wireless streaming to a myriad of mobile devices. Sounds like Boxee will attempt the same kind of thing but I nevver had success with the Boxee for IPAD app so it remains to be seen if they can get there.

+1. I've come close to getting TiVo, but relying on WMC + HDHomeRun for now. Was hoping the new Boxee would at least allow recording to locally connected USB drives or NAS, but only the cloud + the fee make it useless to most IMO. To be honest, if Boxee had simply outed a v2 Box that was the v1 Box + local recording DVR, I'd have bought 1-2 units. Even with HD audio and other issues present.

I've been following the discussion and I seriously don't understand the product concept at all. It just doesn't make sense to me. For example, if this were to function as a true DVR -- record the input transport streams to keep original PQ -- the cloud recording concept would require some serious upload bandwidth. Just about all the Internet services I'm familiar with offer high download speeds at the expense of much lower upload speeds. With two tuners recording a couple HD shows from say CBS and NBC, you are talking 30Mbps of transport stream going up to the cloud. To get that kind of uploading bandwidth you will be paying a small fortune for your Internet service. So I have to believe that this thing has an H.264 encoder so it can compress everything down to Netflix type bitrates (or below) before it sends it out -- which would mean your HDTV recordings would not be original HD PQ, but rather be like Netflix HD which I have read many people say is on par with DVD quality. And still, with two tuners that still would require some healthy uploading bandwidth. And what about having more than one unit?!?

I just don't see this product concept. Am I missing something key here?

I said it in the other Boxee thread but IMHO this new strategy is nothing more than a proof of concept to show that the Cloud DVR technology works and by this time next year Boxee will be sold to the highest bidder.

Their original business model failed so this radical shift is an attempt to appease investors and either get bought or go bankrupt.

Some harsh responses cropping up:

http://xbmc.us/njbetzen/2012/10/17/the-boxee-tv-sucks-for-consumers/

I think I can speak for most of us here when I sum it up as "garbage" lol

I like the simpleTv idea better than BoxeeTV. But where they fail is that it only has one tuner. If it had two tuners it would make sense. But a one tuner device in 2012??

Of course $15 a month for DVR storage for the BoxeeTv is crazy too.

My main problem with Simple.tv is the inability to archive the recordings on my computer or NAS. The recordings are proprietary and only work via Simple.tv. It makes free OTA recordings become DRM'd.

Heh, and Boxee's crappy implementaiton of Netflix only works in the US - and since Netflix just opened in Scandinavia, they are all pretty pissed over there.http://www.facebook.com/NetflixBoxeeBox

SimpleTV records to a USB attached hard drive and is also attached to the network . I haven't checked their site but you probably see that USB with the recorded files on the network (as you would the NAS).

No, the contents of the USB drive (or NAS, if they support it later) will only be readable by Simple.tv. This is from one of their reps in their forums. If they allow you to archive the recordings as original TS or even re-encoded MP4 for playback anywhere, then I at least would be interested in buying in as a cheaper TiVo alternative.