After months of anticipation, open source media developer Boxee has confirmed a November 10 release date for the Boxee Box by D-Link. It will ship to customers who pre-order the Box via Amazon in the United States or Best Buy and Future Shop in Canada.
The Boxee Box will be generally available through the company’s vast network of retail and online distributors on November 17, 2010.
“We’ve seen amazing demand for the Boxee Box across all of our pre-order partners in the US and internationally,” said Rod St. Michel, vice president of consumer sales at D-Link.
“Consumers are looking for the right product to get their favorite TV shows and movies onto their TV from the Internet and their home network, and the Boxee Box is the friendliest, and most consumer-ready product currently available.”
The Boxee Box, which was previewed in December 2009, received critical acclaim from the technology industry and is highly anticipated by consumers. The hardware is the first media device capable of playing most popular file formats from a home network along with free and premium TV shows and movies, videos, music, and photos from the Internet, with support for full 1080p high-definition and 5.1 surround sound.
And since most technology and entertainment consumers already have TVs and home computers with high speed Internet connections, the box merely needs to be plugged in to consolidate both pieces into a highly useable and customizable media center.
Before the Boxee Box project Boxee was known for their open source media software, Boxee. The free to download program lets users create a media management system which is quite spectacular.
Boxee integrates all media on users’ hard drives and it also provides easy access to a large and ever growing amount of Internet content that allows users to basically channel surf on their computers. One of the things people love most about Boxee is the add-ons that give access to quirky but quality programming that conventional cable TV cannot match.
The same software people have grown to love from Boxee on their computers will be the same software that allows the user to operate the Box on their TVs; except the Box improves the system with a nifty remote control so that it gives traditional TV style control to the user.
Pricing for the Box in the U.S. and Canada will be $229 MSRP with an average street price at about $199. For a reasonable price entertainment junkies will be able to make a serious upgrade to their computer entertainment system.
It will be interesting to see if the Boxee Box will become popular with consumers. It has the potential to really change the way people get their entertainment. Technology and electronic media experts have predicted that a system like Boxee could be a challenger that could give the big cable television providers like Comcast a run for their money on ease of use and quality of content.
