In its current form, I can’t recommend anyone buy it.But he was kind of right. The Boxee TV isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution I’d thought and hoped it would be. That doesn’t make it bad, though–as a component of a larger cord-cutting scheme, I think it has a lot of merit. What does make it bad is that the thing is nowhere near ready for retail. It performs like an early alpha–as it stands, it is not usable. 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. Boxee TV is in stores now, and in its current form, I can’t recommend anyone buy 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. You can’t buy a product with the hopes it’ll work later–it has to work when you give someone money for it. So don’t give anyone money for it, not now.

This is totally different from what Boxee has done in the past. 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. 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. You have videos you’ve downloaded, or a subscription to Netflix or Hulu Plus, and these boxes play that content. They’re middlemen.

How Does It Work?

The Boxee TV is all about the Boxee TV service. 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. It’s not a guide, exactly. More like a list of icons, each one showing an individual episode. It looks okay but takes up an awful lot of space with not very much information. 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.”). 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. You can choose which shows to record on the web app (my.boxee.tv), but there’s no way to do it on the Boxee TV itself. Watching something new and want to record future episodes? Go get your laptop. 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). As a service, I like the idea of Boxee TV. Over-the-air HD is surprisingly high quality, and with unlimited storage, I can have Jeopardy! marathons or just set it to record all Seinfeld episodes and eventually build up a multi-season library. It’s easy to schedule recordings, and when it works, video quality is excellent. Even for a TV snob like myself, there are lots and lots of shows I want to watch that air on broadcast TV. One problem: I already have a Hulu Plus subscription, and Hulu Plus has access to most of the broadcast shows I watch. Also you can’t see what’s scheduled to be recorded. Also there’s no recommendation service, like TiVo or even Netflix. The thing just wasn’t ready before launch.Another problem: Boxee TV, at the moment, is one of the buggiest devices I’ve ever tested. The recordings section says it’s in “beta.” Nope. No, it’s not. The cloud DVR is the complete sales pitch for this device; without recordings, this is an extremely expensive antenna with Netflix. You don’t get to say “this is beta,” offer it for free for a few months, and have a free pass when it doesn’t work. Make it work (at least mostly work) before people buy it. You can’t sell someone a car with two wheels missing and promise they’ll be delivered later, then tell them they can sit inside and use the air conditioning, which works great right now. Cloud DVR is the Boxee TV. It’s not a bonus feature that’s allowed to not be ready. Boxee had problems with the Boxee Box when it was first released, tons of bugs that killed its launch momentum, so I was hoping Boxee had learned its lesson and would deliver the Boxee TV all polished and pretty, but man is it ever not.

Bugs

Oh, right, the Boxee TV hardware repeatedly freezes, so you have to completely restart the machine. When I say “repeatedly,” I don’t mean “more than once during my week of testing,” I mean “when you do pretty much anything, and sometimes when you do nothing at all.” Like, multiple times per half hour. That’s bad for any hard drives you have attached to the USB ports, and the Boxee TV, while quicker than the Boxee Box, is still not very quick to boot up. On the plus side, there’s a reset button, rather than a hole you have to press with a bent paper clip. Did Boxee know users were going to have to restart the box about every four minutes? And the hardware gets insanely hot–there’s not a lot of metal on it, but the coax jack gets too hot to touch within minutes. And you’re supposed to leave this thing on all the time! Boxee tells me they’re working on fixing bugs, that the cloud DVR is a very new idea and that they did all the testing they could before launch but of course there’ll be problems with anything this new. But there’s no way these are all new bugs, totally unknown during beta testing, and besides, lots of them have nothing to do with the cloud DVR. The thing just wasn’t ready before launch, that’s all. (Look at these user reviews!)

Apps

Sorry, Boxee Box Devotees

Boxee TV is very much not the Boxee Box 2, even though the Boxee Box is being discontinued now that the Boxee TV is around. The Boxee TV does not have AirPlay, the futuristic and very easy way to fling any video or audio from an iPhone or iPad up to your TV. It doesn’t support DLNA to stream from your network, though Boxee tells me it will, at some undetermined point in the future. It has a file browser, and it can still play back any file you can throw at it, but it no longer organizes them in that nice way the Boxee Box did. The Boxee Box snagged metadata from all your TV and movies, got cover art from IMDb, and organized them all really nicely. The Boxee TV is just a file browser; you have to remember which hard drive your video is on, then which folder, then which annoying long filename it has. The Boxee Box was great for pirates; the Boxee TV has the same featureset for pirates as a tiny, cheap Roku, except much buggier. Are you supposed to use a Boxee TV and a Boxee Box? Oh, and the hardware’s worse. It no longer has dedicated audio-out; the Boxee Box supported both RCA and optical audio, the Boxee TV has neither. The Boxee Box worked with USB hubs, so you could plug in as many USB devices as you want. The Boxee TV has two USB ports and does not support hubs. The remote control is worse in every way; it loses that fantastic QWERTY keyboard on the back, gains a specific button for Netflix and Vudu (these are basically just free advertising, and in the Boxee TV’s current state, pressing the Netflix button usually caused the Boxee TV to crash), and uses a different wireless protocol that forces you to point the remote directly at the Boxee TV. And there’s no universal search, which the Boxee Box had and which even Roku has now.

In Conclusion

I genuinely have a lot of respect for this company and for the products they’ve made in the past; I think they have the right ideas about the future of television and I think they have the capability to make some really outstanding stuff. So I find it sort of insulting that, for the second time (out of only two hardware products in the company’s history!), they’d release a product that is nowhere near ready for release. This kind of thing is acceptable in the hacker communities that spawned Boxee; you can have the ideas, and then fix the execution later. A person who has serious opinions about SMB sharing would be fine with that. But the Boxee TV is not for that person; the company’s retail partner is Walmart, for God’s sake, and they’ve taken a lot of pains to get the price down to a competitive $100. The Boxee TV is, as Boxee’s CEO told me, “for the people, by the geeks.” He also told me that Boxee’s goal is to pass the “babysitter test,” in which a stranger in your house can pick up the remote and figure out how to use it. And, like, maybe, because the Boxee TV is certainly simplified, but the babysitter won’t want to use it, because it doesn’t work. I don’t even want to use it, and I wrote a goddamn 5,500-word article about how great this company is. My roommate, who is a normal guy (meaning, not a nerd like me), has recently adapted to the Boxee Box. He understands it now, and he thinks it’s great. He uses it when I’m not there. He was really excited when I told him I had the new Boxee. An hour later, after we couldn’t play a video over AirPlay, after live TV skipped and stuttered, after the Boxee TV had to be reset twice, after a recording had the phrase “no signal” on a grey background for 10 minutes, and after we had to scroll through folders on a hard drive to play a downloaded video, he delivered his verdict. “This sucks,” he said. And went to his room. I was very hesitant to even write this review. I never review things in beta; I prefer to wait until I can speak about the product as a consumer will actually use it. And I actually do have faith that Boxee will fix many of the problems with the Boxee TV. In six months, I’ll review it again, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I like it quite a bit. (I also won’t be surprised if it’s half the price it is now.) But this product is in stores, stacked high on endcaps in Walmarts across the land, with big bold letters on the boxes promising that you can cut thousands of dollars from your cable TV bill if you only drop a hundred bucks on this box. People will buy it. Not a lot of people, probably, but some. And that’s messed up, because this product is not ready for people to buy it. The promise of the product working later isn’t good enough; the Roku works now, the Apple TV works now, the Xbox 360 works now. This isn’t 2003 and their potential users aren’t a BBS messageboard full of Linux users. This is Walmart and this is Christmas season, and this thing is not ready.