Pretty good! But the only channels of those 45 I’d ever really watch are the broadcast networks–NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox, CW, maybe Univision if I want to see how bad my Spanish has gotten since high school. From there, you can record either just the one airing of a program (good for movies), all new episodes (good for dramas you’ll never re-watch), or all episodes (good for building up libraries of Seinfeld and The Simpsons).īoxee TV, at the moment, is one of the buggiest devices I’ve ever tested.In New York, after a lot of testing and rearranging, my antenna picked up 45 channels. Watching something new and want to record future episodes? Go get your laptop.
#Boxee firmware update 2012 tv#
You can choose which shows to record on the web app (my.), but there’s no way to do it on the Boxee TV itself. Click the right button on the remote’s directional pad, and you see your recordings, which are organized by most recent and by TV show. Live TV plays in the background there’s actually no way to get it to stop (clicking the pause button gives a message that pausing live TV is “not available…yet.”). It looks okay but takes up an awful lot of space with not very much information. More like a list of icons, each one showing an individual episode.
#Boxee firmware update 2012 plus#
When you look at your homescreen, you see a list of what’s currently playing on all your channels, plus what’s coming up later in the day. The Boxee TV is all about the Boxee TV service. You have videos you’ve downloaded, or a subscription to Netflix or Hulu Plus, and these boxes play that content. That’s the way all other streaming set-top boxes work, whether an Apple TV or a Roku or a Western Digital or an Xbox 360. Boxee’s only other hardware product, the Boxee Box, was in spirit a do-anything Roku: it was designed to get content you already have (or have access to) onto your TV. This is totally different from what Boxee has done in the past.
(It is similar thematically to Aereo, except it’s actually legal, and designed to play back on your TV rather than on a computer–though it can stream on a computer, or tablet, or smartphone.) You can even watch live TV from any device, with about a 30-second delay. (It also has two tuners, so you can watch one thing while recording another, or record two things at once if you’re not watching anything.) Record every Seinfeld episode! Why not? Then you can play your recordings back on pretty much any device, from anywhere. For $10 a month (right now it’ll be $15 later), you can record an unlimited number of shows–it records on an Amazon server out in the cloud, not on a hard drive in your house, so no need to worry about storage. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.), picks up a couple dozen stations. The pitch for the Boxee TV revolves around the “cloud DVR.” The device, a little flat black box about the size and shape of a VHS, comes with a high-def antenna, which, if you’re in a major media area (like New York, where I tested it–the others are Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. So don’t give anyone money for it, not now. You can’t buy a product with the hopes it’ll work later–it has to work when you give someone money for it. I’ve been chatting with Boxee as I test the unit, and they keep telling me firmware updates are coming, but that’s not enough. Boxee TV is in stores now, and in its current form, I can’t recommend anyone buy it. Boxee has done this kind of thing in the past with the Boxee Box, which was also basically broken at launch and was slowly fixed with firmware upgrades, but that doesn’t make this acceptable. It performs like an early alpha–as it stands, it is not usable. What does make it bad is that the thing is nowhere near ready for retail. That doesn’t make it bad, though–as a component of a larger cord-cutting scheme, I think it has a lot of merit. The Boxee TV isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution I’d thought and hoped it would be. In its current form, I can’t recommend anyone buy it.But he was kind of right. I thought he was just trying to play nice with the content providers like Comcast and Viacom, feigning modesty so they wouldn’t see Boxee as an enemy. He said it was just a component, not a complete solution. That’s everything! But Ronen repeatedly insisted that the Boxee TV was not a cure-all for cord-cutters. It would have apps like Netflix and YouTube, sure, but it would also be a Boxee, so it’d play downloaded videos in that great, clean way Boxee always has, and then it’d have this cool new cloud DVR so it could record live TV shows and play them back on any device. When I spoke to Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in the run-up to the release of the Boxee TV, it was hard not to see the nascent set-top box as the best new tool for those wanting to ditch cable.
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