All Articles Tagged Boxee

Julie Jacobson | 02/09 08:55 AM, 4 Comments

The cable companies are pathetic, and the FCC is too if it accepts a proposition from MSOs to encrypt basic cable channels. Currently, cable companies must offer the most basic stations – usually broadcast channels – to its customers free of charge, without requiring a set-top box, i.e., without encrypting the signals in such a way that a proprietary box from the cable company is needed. Now the cable companies (MSOs or MVPDs) are lobbying the government via an FCC proposed rule-making for permission to encrypt the signals and thereby… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 03/29 09:56 AM, 6 Comments

Dedicated media servers are a dying breed … or maybe not. “From our perspective, it’s going well,” said Joseph Storm, founder of Fusion Research, during the recent Electronic House Expo in Orlando, Fla. The secret to Fusion’s longevity? “We think pricing needs to be affordable.” For its part, Fusion’s media server solutions start at about $3,000, but only a handful of like-minded vendors still offer something similar. In the past few years, we’ve seen the demise of many top-name custom-friendly media servers – some of which were resurrected as new… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 11/22 08:41 AM, 5 Comments

Following a presentation on "Streaming Media" earlier this month during CE Pro Live, integrators gathered in a virtual chat room to discuss the topic. One overriding theme emerged: Streaming content is confusing and integrators aren't quite sure how to present it to their clients and how to profit from it. Talk turned to Hulu, Google TV, Apple TV, Vudu, Roku, Boxee, digital rights management and the problems of bandwidth limitation. In other chats during CE Pro Live, integrators expressed frustration about Internet providers throttling bandwidth, charging more for usage and… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 09/22 07:35 AM, 0 Comments

Fusion Research offers some of the more affordable multiroom media servers for the custom integration channel. And now the company adds streaming media to the line, most notably Boxee. We’re looking at all of the specialty multiroom movie servers in the custom channel, and few of them implement Boxee in a unified interface. Crestron’s ADMS has it; Windows Media Center machines from S1Digital and Vidabox certainly allow it, although the WMC implementation is pretty kludgy; Request, one of the first to bring streaming media to dedicated content management systems, doesn’t… View this story

Arlen Schweiger | 08/26 09:14 AM, 0 Comments

Some more good news for fans of content aggregator and streamer Boxee. The company announced it has added a “Movie Library” to its menu, and is launching it with the help of four content partners. If you’re sick and tired of Hollywood’s big-budget lack of creativity, it could be worth your while to give some of these independent flicks a try. They’ll be offered from EZTakes, Indie Movies Online, MUBI and Openfilm - most are free, ad-supported. Maybe the most intriguing source here is OpenFilm, which features an online community… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 02/08 09:58 AM, 2 Comments

When Boxee was still an up-and-coming content aggregator, the company owed a good chunk of its popularity for putting a fresh face on Hulu. Hulu was just one destination offered via the Boxee interface, which provides easy access to dozens of other streaming sites. In February 2009, however, Hulu ordered Boxee (and TV.com) to cease offering Hulu content on their sites. Later, Hulu altered its format so third parties could no longer embed Hulu content – or at least they couldn’t do it as easily as before. Third parties such… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 01/23 08:03 AM, 10 Comments

Add Boxee to the growing list of digital content providers that will start charging for their goods. The content aggregation service, which currently delivers free TV shows and movies over the Internet, plans “release a Payment Platform this summer where users will be able to make purchases with one click on the remote,” writes CEO Avner Ronen in a blog. The content partners we launch with will offer shows, movies and channels that were previously not available to Boxee users. The content owners will be able to package and price… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 01/06 12:44 PM, 3 Comments

D-Link, lose the gimmicky designs! First it was the awkward Boxee Box (below), and now the Zen-like “Pebble” (above). Introduced during CES 2010, the Pebble is "a uniquely designed media player that lets users play virtually all of their media in an attractive, easy-to-use and compact device," according to D-Link. Unique? Yes. Practical? No. You can’t stack them. You can’t fit them gracefully in a media console. There are plenty of ways to make black boxes chic. They may not win design awards, but they’re sure to be more pleasing… View this story

Julie Jacobson | 12/28 08:13 AM, 20 Comments

Last year, the Consumer Electronics Association created a contest for technology startups called i-stage. The winner was an unknown called Boxee, a content aggregator so comprehensive that Hulu was a mere subset of its offerings (until Hulu pulled the plug). Boxee was perhaps the first company to combine IP-based video from Hulu, CBS, Joost, Netflix, YouTube and scores of other content providers in a single user interface. On top of that is a social networking element so users can recommend shows to their friends. If 2009 was a momentum-building year… View this story