Just the other day we were asked whatever happened to that Iomega Boxee Box announced at CES. Of course, the anticipated February ship date has long come and gone. But all is not lost however, as their NAS-endowed Boxee Box variant is expected to hit retail next month. From Iomega’s head of Product Marketing.
We will make the product available in Europe by mid-October and we’re focusing launch efforts in retail and etail in Germany, UK, Sweden, Spain and France. This is where Boxee has already identified the best localised content so far. We will also offer the product in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland and Portugal. We had great feedback from our channel partners in those countries so that we decided to extend our launch there.
All of which makes me wonder if D-Link has locked down a period of Boxee exclusivity here in the US or if projected sales in our market just weren’t favorable. Then again, this particular Iomega rep appears to specialize in that other continent and happened to be speaking at a European conference. So a fall US launch probably isn’t out of the question. Yet, despite Iomega’s value-added NAS capabilities, I prefer D-Link’s funky Boxee enclosure and am hopeful of seeing a second gen unit later this fall… perhaps with over-the-air capabilities.
(Via Jeremy Toeman’s Future of TV Newsletter)
I might pick one up if it resolves the HD audio bitstreaming issue. It’s unlikely, since it’ll be running identical hardware and software.
Ask and ye shall receive apparently. Now if we could just find out where the PopBox ran off to….
I’m wondering what is happening over there at Boxee given how little progress appears to have been made since it became available. Where the hell is Hulu Plus support? Where is Amazon Instant Video?
As you suggest it seems like the only likely explanation is there is another product coming, and probably the new features won’t necessarily be coming to the existing box. You’d think if its coming out this year at all you’d see an announcement by what, the end of October? If they want to get it into retail and get it sold for Christmas?
I’ll probably just keep sitting on my hands.
September and October are the big announcement months, but I’ve seen things slip into November. We shall see…
It needs a version with HDMI 1.4.
I use BoxeeBox hooked up directly to a small(er) TV without surround sound and the two main bugs I’ve seen is audio cutting off for a few second when playing MKVs with surround sound and, infrequently, it kicks me out of a video (fortunately, it saves the spot, so I just resume).
There’s no Amazon Prime app, but it should – theoretically – work with a browser, but there’s a bug or some sort of a fix that needs to happen.
Not sure what’s the deal with Hulu Plus. They’ve been mum on the subject. I use HuluPlus with TiVo Premiere or, more often the last few weeks, I’ve started watching HuluPlus on my iPad 2 in bed (catching up on Remington Steele… but had to buy DVDs since S3 is missing some episodes and S4 & S5 are missing).