Boxee Box
We purchased the Boxee Box months ago now and cancelled our cable. With everything that this little box streams it makes no sense to have cable. It streams so many different channels and tons of content for being in Canada. The picture quality is awesome. And I just love the remote for the Boxee Box. I love that is has a full QWERTY keyboard right on the remote. How cool is that.Boxee is a media streaming device. It streams:
- Streams thousands of freely available TV shows from various networks' websites
- Plays thousands of add-supported movies and TV episodes, which are freely available for on-demand streaming from numerous web-based providers
- Streams thousands of premium movies and TV episodes from subscription-based or pay-per-view web services, such as Netflix and Vudu
- Plays videos, songs, or pictures from an attached USB drive or from home network shares
- Plays or displays any non-DRM video, audio, and photos from anywhere on the Internet
- Supports a wide range of media formats, including...
- video: MKV, FLV, MTS/MT2S/TS, AVI, DivX MPEG4, XVid MPEG4, MOV, MP4-2, WMV9
- images: JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF
Connections
An SD Card slot, located on the device's side, is barely visible in the photo above. The photo below shows the following I/O and power connections, which are situated on the Boxee Box's rear panel:
- HDMI port
- Optical digital audio (S/PDIF) out
- Stereo analog audio out
- Ethernet RJ-45 connector
- 2 USB 2.0 ports
- AC power input jack
For all of you Canadian users I know one of your questions will be what Channels does Boxee stream. Here is a list of the channels that it streams: CBC, CityTV, Comedy Network, Crunchyroll, CTV, Discovery, Engadget, Food Network, Global, HGTV, History, MTV, Revision 3, Showcase, Slice, Space, Spike TV, TED, Tou TV, TVO, TvTropolis, VICE and YTV. I will say that this is the current list as of today. It changes and more keep being added for instance two days ago MTV was not on this list and it is there today.
It also has more apps that you can imagine currently for Canada it has 183 apps. Some of my personal favourites are: Netflix (this does require an $8 subscription each month), YouTube, Boxee Browser, AccuWeather, VEVO, flickr, CineTrailer, Live Station News, Radio Time, cnet tv, SPEED, ABC 7 News, CBC The National on Demand, The Onion, Khan Academy and so much more way to many to list if you ask me.
I highly recommend the boxee for both streaming online content and from a hard drive.
I'm curious as to how long you've had the Box and how long you've been without cable? I'm in Kitchener and my wife and I were looking at our cable bill, and cut it back to basic as we realized we were only watching maybe 5-6 shows religiously. With basic still being around $40/mo plus another $30/mo for the PVR, we've been seriously liking what we see with Boxee. We are Netflix customers as well. And we go through TekSavvy for our cable internet. I'd love to read updates as to how things go. Its hard to find Canadian user opinions on this. Mostly I think because most are brainwashed into accepting the "big two" for content.
ReplyDeleteAnd, not sure if you're aware: repositories offer even MORE choice. There's a list on the Boxee site but this: dir.fuzzthed.com gives all third party apps instantly.
ReplyDeleteFuzzthed also has a list of repositories on his site as well.