Boxee @ CES Wrap-Up

andrew kippen — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:01:36 +0000

6 days, 4 awards, 2 booths, 1 suite, dozens of meetings, hundreds of interviews, thousands of demos, multiple all-nighters… The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was a mixture of excitement, adrenaline, exhaustion, and a lot of hard work. Quotes like this one from the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones about the Boxee Box by D-Link make it all worth it though, “finally we had a device that could do what few in the tech industry have managed – make Apple’s rival product look distinctively second best.”

First and foremost. a big thank you to all of our users who have carried us this far, especially those who have been vocal about what they love about Boxee and what we could do better. We continue to rely on your feedback to improve Boxee and bring connected devices into the living room that are driven by your needs.

Secondly, it’s been great working with D-Link and Nvidia on our first hardware device, the Boxee Box. Now that it’s been announced, we can’t wait to bring it to market in the 2nd quarter of this year. Meanwhile our BD team is hard at work ensuring Boxee will arrive on TVs, game consoles, and other living room devices soon.

As a quick recap, here’s some of the awards and articles we garnered over the course of the show…

Awards:

LAPTOP’s Best of CES 2010: Best Home Entertainment – Boxee Box by D-Link
Winner Last Gadget Standing
Best of CES: Popular Science Products of the Future
CEA Best of Innovations: Home Theater Accessories
G4 Best of the Best at CES
Dave Graveline’s Top 10 @ CES
CNet Best in Show Finalist: Home Theater

Articles:

BBC – dot.Rory: CES 2010: Last Gadget Standing
CNN – Boxee Box crowned ‘Last Gadget Standing’ at CES
NBC Washington – Boxee Box Just Made Couch Potatoes’ Lives Even Easier
Wired.com Gadget Lab – Hands-On With the Boxee Set-Top Box and Remote
Engadget – Hands-on with the Boxee Box
Scobleizer: Part I — Hot Startups to Watch in 2010
TechCrunch – Boxee Beta Now Available To The Masses
Lifehacker – First Look at the Boxee Beta – Boxee beta
Gizmodo – Beta Now Available for Public Download, Box Has Tegra 2 Chip
Mashable – Boxee Beta Goes Public and Boxee Box Specs Revealed
Ubergizmo’s Best of CES
…more from Google

Videos:

Here I am presenting Boxee at Last Gadget Standing. The intro video was streamed from Adult Swim’s site for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job (a recommendation if you ever enjoyed Mr. Show with Bob & David).

And here’s Avner running through a demo of Boxee’s Beta software at the D-Link booth.

Photos:

We had a pretty busy booth… lots of people came over to get demos and hear more about Boxee and the Boxee Box by D-Link.

(to see 3 photos from the show and 36 other photos of us partying… go here)

We couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2010. Thanks for all the support and we look forward to bringing you much more in the months to come!

*Special thanks to Boxee users @BobSuicide, @JaylinSuicide, and @iMelody who worked our booth with an air of professionalism, intelligence, and passion we could not have paid for.

Step 1: Make a Boxee Box (no need to cut a hole)

andrew kippen — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:00:20 +0000

First and foremost thanks to everyone who came out to the Music Hall of Williamsburg Monday night – it was a great event and was fun to see so many users, partners, and press in person. We posted the details of the Beta Monday night, and if you haven’t done so yet, register on our pre-release list to get an invite to the Beta over the coming weeks.

So there’s been a lot of talk about the Boxee Box over the past 36 hours and we wanted to give you the “official” version.

It was designed by Astro Studios, the team who crafted designs for the Xbox 360, watches from Nike, Alienware PCs. It’s being built by D-Link, the leading networking company for homes & small businesses. Working with D-Link means that we’ll be able to design, build, and release a Boxee Box at a low cost to a ton of etail and retail outlets.

As the title indicates, this is step 1. Soon, every device in your living room will connect to the Internet, and we hope Boxee will be the software that runs on them. For now though, the Boxee Box is the easiest way to get Boxee onto that huge HDTV in your living room. Here’s how you can make that connection happen…

HDMI – one inexpensive HDMI cable to connect The Boxee Box to your TV
SPDIF – hi-definition digital audio that will pass through Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound and DTS to your A/V Receiver
Stereo Audio (RCA) – red & white cables from the 80′s, 90′s and today
2 x USB ports – add devices like external hard drives and more
Wireless 802.11n & Wired Ethernet – Cords if you got ‘em, wireless if you don’t
RF Remote Control – control playback from anywhere

And although the above pictures look really classy, they don’t give you an idea of the size of the box. Here’s a preliminary image to give you an idea of scale.

Rest assured the Boxee Box will fit into your entertainment center. If the look doesn’t quite fit with your decor, not to worry. The RF remote means you can place the box out of sight and still control it. Of course, the Boxee Box prefers being on top : )

We’ll reveal more about the Boxee Box by D-Link at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but if you’d like to see a little more, check out the new page for the Box on our completely re-designed website.