Bye-bye Boxee: how a startup failed to conquer the living room | Hacker News Reader

Bye-bye Boxee: how a startup failed to conquer the living room

gigaom.com

58 pointsantr52 comments

As a Boxee Box owner, I think they had a chance, a niche of their own and they blew it.

When I bought the Boxee Box, it was because I had sampled the software for free on a regular PC first. Yes, you could actually download the software, see that it met your needs, and then buy it, prepacked as a dedicated device, an appliance.

It was genius marketing and it had me throwing out my old setup instantly. Everything just worked. The remote was unmatched. Simple on one side. Qwerty on the other side, for apps, searches, etc.

The box itself played all kinds of file-formats & sources without a hitch. It extracted, identified and unified meta-data much better than any other software I have seen, and auto-combined it into a huge database, all without having performance degraded, like much software does when the library goes big.

Everything was great. They even shipped updates, and with a simple checkbox, you could join the beta-channel to get early releases.

And you did get releases often enough to feel that you were using a living product. It was great.

But then, suddenly they seemed to shift focus. You could no longer download and sample the software. You had to buy the box, unsampled. Then they shifted focus away from the one thing it did great (play your media, from your storage and network devices) to the one everyone fails at: Creating a "unified livingroom media experience".

Big surprise: They failed at it.

They wanted me to sign up for an account, have it integrate with everything social, pull all my friends embarassing youtube likes and linked facebook content, in my face, everytime I turned the device on.

And then they stopped updating the apps and app-repos. That Youtube app which was kinda shit, but sorta worked? Yeah, no longer working after Youtube introduced couch-mode. And they're not fixing it either.

There also seems to be some performance problems arising. But nobody has been pushing any updates to fix that. So you need to reboot the device every now and then.

They went from being what everyone wished XBMC could be, to something completely without focus. They took and sacrificed the one thing they did well trying to be "everything to everyone".

They took something which worked well and let it rot, super-busy failing at something else.

I hope Samsung buying these guys means they will be going back to doing what they used to do well. Because I need a new media-box soon and I still haven't found anything which looks like a worthwhile replacement for my old Boxee box.

I was a Boxee Box early adopter and got it as soon as it came out. I think what crippled it is that what you got with the Box wasn't anything like Boxee was before, it was an entirely new Beta UI, and then right around the same time they killed the standalone version. So in one fell swoop I went from an awesome media center to the buggy Boxee Box.

Unfortunately the thing just barely worked. They patched over the next few months and eventually it became okayish but at that point it was just too much of a hassle and I returned it. It never met the user experience of the downloaded version + a standalone computer; which is weird because I bought the box to skip the hassles of a normal PC, updates, noise, OS issues, etc.

The remote is brilliant though, I bought a standalone version of the remote that I still use today.

I mostly use Roku's now, and while the older ones were sluggish the new Roku 3 has a nice fast UI that lets me watch what I want. It's nice to have a system level search that looks for content on both Netflix and Amazon at the same time.

But the Boxee had this awesome feature where it put the content first, the TV show was the top level item. So you would find the show you want, and then it would present you the sources. On the Roku I have to remember if the show I was watching was on Netflix or Amazon. I can't imagine content providers would be happy with this though, it basically backshelves their brand.

For local content Plex with a Roku is a pretty nice setup.

> to the one everyone fails at: Creating a "unified livingroom media experience"

Indeed. What I wouldn't give to have simple media playback from USB storage instead of "unified livingroom media experience" on consoles ...

If you have a SmartTV you already have a simple media playback from any of your devices, and from usb storage its dumb easy just stick it in the tv... if you want the output to your smartphone then setup a dlna/upnp server somewhere and stick the usb storage into that.

Run a minidlna server there, and thats about it, now the TV can browse and play all the things Ive pointed minidlna too, and I can control the TV using upnp apps on my phone, its a nice touchy interface with UPnPlay that can also render the content on the phone if Id like.

A raspberry pi can run xbmc if you dont have a place/smallish-server where to run minidlna, and xbmc has a upnp-server, so you can mount your content over ftp/samba/http/upnp/nfs, or just plug your NAS into the raspberry.

Different networks? No problem, bridge them or use VPN and set a route for multicast.

EDIT: If anyone is interested I can write a blogpost about it as it wasnt long ago I tinkered with these setups. Especially IP multicasting was hairy.

Well you make it sound so easy! An issue with the technology is trying to keep up with it.

I have a basic HD tv (a samsung), it's not smart. It will play media from USB, and it plays a lot of formats - only it suffers with a few annoying quirks. I have sizing issues with the picture, and the media player doesn't let me turn the screen off. It almost works. DVD playback is pretty poor too with a separate LG player.

I don't want to run a separate media centre machine or NAS, all I want to do, is plug a drive into the TV. I don't even care for the IMDB stuff. Just the basics, easily locate file quickly, play it, play it from where I last paused etc. A Pi sounds promising - though I wonder how good the actual picture would be. Everytime I've tried XBMC or some such on a computer, the picture never appears that smooth.

Not everyone has a smart phone either. What I'd like is something like a Tablet, with HDMI out, and an SD card, and/or USB port - that I could quickly attach to the TV.

The basics feel neglected.

"Plug it in and turn your dumb HD tv into a 'Smart'" schenaningans is on the market, if you duck it there are several such USB-sticks, but I dont know how good any of them are. Its more fun making your own I belive, and you get to play with raspberry if you go that route.

Ive tried a Pi model B with XBMC and the output of it is indeed 1080p and looking smooth, it can play an HD file without stuttering/lagging over samba over openvpn. On the openvpn/samba server I have 30mbit up/down and Pi has 54mbit wifi then ADSL with up to 20mbit down.

Hm, if you dont want the Pi route, perhaps getting the cheapest andorid tablet with hdmi out would do well, as you can run a upnp-renderer on it, the tablet should have wifi as well. But then youd still have to run a dlna server on some of your computers, for example on laptop.

Thanks, can the Pi with Plex or XBMC, play straight from say a USB hard drive? What's the audio quality like on it?

The Pi with OpenElec (XBMC) automounts USB drives. The onboard audio is supposed to not be great (crackles when there is USB load? Not sure if this is fixed). But if you're using the audio over HDMI to play through your TV, it should be fine.

OpenELEC also supports CEC so you can use your TV remote to directly control XBMC.

There is no reason why it wouldnt play straight from a USB hard drive - but it only has 2 usb ports so keep that in mind, I used both of them - wireless keyboard/mouse and wifi.

You do need to know some Linux commands, I doubt/havent tried to see if XBMC can auto-mount things inserted. But that would be cool if it worked like that. Perhaps the raspbmc distribution has the automount setup done for you.

Audio quality, only had TV speakers to "try" it out with, sounded just like any other content, so I cant tell you if it suits for a high-end audio system, but the audio-over-hdmi worked with no fiddling from my side.

As someone who has an otherwise perfectly good TV but without any smart-TV addons (as I've understood are poor replacements for something like a Boxee), I'd love to see such a blog-post.

Good media management is more than just accessing files though. It's building a library, indexing, organizing, etc. As far as I've seen UPnP solutions, this has always been a lacking. How have you handled this?

The building a library/organizing - minidlna has handled that well, it scanned through my music and exposes Albums/Artist/Genre listings, not only the folder browser, and searching also works good. For now.

I am now looking to improve the quality of my music library so I am using beets to organize it right now, it corrects tags, fingerprint, deduplicate, fetch covers and so on. Its a tedious process because I do help it manually. Once its done, Ill use beetFs to expose the beets database of the collection on a new mountpoint, and thats where Ill point minidlna. That way beets wont need to change the tags on disk (screwing up the torrents hashes), or copy/move files around. But minidlna will get served the corrected tags through beetFs.

Its quite nice to just easily access huge music library on smartphone, good search and nice browsing, then download whatever artists or albums I like to the phone, or listen to, or select my brothers TV to play them on when Im at his house. Basically all of this functionality is in UPnP-av/DLNA with implementation by minidlna and UPnPlay.

Ive yet to setup a nice gallery/picture thing.

Ill get back to you once Ive made the blogpost (any suggestion where I can just write this and leave it there, github?), I made it sound easy, but I see thats because Ive spent the last few days playing with these stuff, have been trying out mediatomb, ushare and coherence too as servers, but as you say I wasnt pleased with their indexing.

I used Boxee a while back when it was on the original AppleTV's, then before that way before the whole Boxee Box thing begun.

It was very buggy, SMB shares always very slow no matter which computer the boxee client ran on.

Now adays I run everything through Plex and couldn't be happier, it runs on Samsung TVs as well which is a bonus, as well as a lot of other devices (and computers).

The Xbox 360 media player will play stuff of USB storage.

xbox 360 media player was never able to handle mkv files (unless there's been an update in the 2 years that I've had my 360 powered down)

There was also that xbox 360 dashboard update that downgraded the playback quality of avi files.

"There also seems to be some performance problems arising. But nobody has been pushing any updates to fix that. So you need to reboot the device every now and then."

I've been having the same problem. I've configured it to stop scanning my Windows PC network shared and that seems to have fixed the "endlessly rebooting every 30 seconds" problem I was having... but I'm still having a problem where if I leave it on for over a day then it will lock up or lose internet connectivity.

My other big gripe is that when I use the menu to shutdown it just locks up the box instead of shutting down.

I've be consider giving the hacked boxeeplus firmware a try, but I haven't bothered because I know it's not supported either.

Boxee's main problem is they built a platform for pirates, sold it at break-even and expected to make their money selling said pirates $5 VOD movies from walmart.

I was drawn to Boxee over XBMC because of the legitimate media sources it worked well with (YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc). Granted I could do the same with XBMC (in fact I do do the same with XBMC), but Boxee just worked nicer out of the box.

Plus most of the local storage stuff I had was CD and vinyl rips.

Boxee organised it's content by metatags, so I'd imagine it would be slightly annoying for pirates (which, more often than not, are labelled wrong) than other similar solutions which place a higher precedence on organisation via directory hierarchy (Boxee could do this too - but it was much more awkward to get to than in XBMC et al)

They built a platform for pirates, tried to pivot to be a legit business, was met with resistance from companies they had previously been empowering pirates against, and so tried to pivot again to something no one, pirate or non-pirate, really wanted (cloud dvr).

The same can be said about the iPod.

Except for the sold at break even part.

I used boxee mostly for it's unparalleled ability to play all kinds of downloaded [did i just say that?] movie formats from external sources and 10% for it's WiFi + ability to render all kinds of movie resolutions on all kinds of TV screens correctly.

It's design though was clunky and awkward and I never was going to pay for any subscriptions and BS along these lines.

I still think that it's future could [or may] be in improving, enhancing and "universalling" it's hardware to add more capabilities.

No one needs yet-another-stupid-platform used to monetize it's owners and de-monetize your pocket.

Everyone needs simple, working and supported solutions.

For anyone actually looking for the ultimate HTPC, I've tried pretty much everything and the absolute best I've found is a combo of an Apple TV with Beamer.app [0] to play just about anything and everything with a great UI, awesome Netflix support, iTunes renting/buying, etc. etc. etc.

0: http://beamer-app.com/ (I'm not affiliated in any way, other than being a very satisfied customer that has had several feature requests fulfilled by the author)

Barebones box with intel atom, a bit of ram, and a small HDD is cheaper and does all that, and you don't have to deal with sidestepping Apple's odd file format restrictions. Throw XBMC on there and you're done, for about $150.

Apple TV is $99.

Good luck updating it after Apple decides you won't.

Don't get me wrong. AppleTV is certainly a decent value, but it'll never do anything Tim Cook disapproves.

Never heard of Beamer, but I rarely stream/control video directly from the laptop. I've been using Air Video with both the iPad/iPhone (http://www.inmethod.com/air-video) + Drobo for media storage and it works like clockwork. I will still take a look at Beamer.

I bought this app 2 days ago. I have a video that plays perfectly fine on my laptop but on the Apple TV the video goes blank after 15 minutes. It was a choice between them and AirParrot. Although it was cheaper I didn't need the mirroring AirParrot provides.

From: http://beamer-app.com/ "Without a license, playback is limited to the first 15 minutes of each movie."

Why not just use Airplay? It's free and video that plays on your laptop can be mirrored onto your TV.

I'm seriously considering a Raspberry Pi or a cheap Android HDMI stick and run Netflix on it. Has anyone tried that?

I'm not familiar with Apple TV. Why is beamer necessary. Can the Apple TV not play video files from a network share?

No. It requires your files to be a format iTunes understands (which mostly limits it to stuff bought in the i-store) and in a iTunes media-library on a PC running on your network. Which for most non-Appleheads is pretty bad and for some (like me) even a no-go.

It could be worse though. In the olden days you had to synch the media to your Apple TV before being able to play it.

  sudo port install ffmpeg

You're welcome.

if you already have a Mac, why not just use airplay?

I just plug a cheap Windows laptop directly into my LCD TV.

That way I get more than just video. I can use the full operating system to do anything at all.

As a Boxee owner i really liked it (the box itself is so nice in the living room, it's neat!), but unfortunately some dumbass in the management decided it would be better to fork xbmc, close the source.. that was the the problem. The hardware was nice, the UI was nice, but no updates, obviously D-Link couldn't keep up, they shut down many addons... a shame.

Fortunately i bought a Raspberry Pi last month, put XBMC on it and am happier then ever. For a for better price!

R.I.P. Boxee, your management blew it.

do you have Netflix working on that setup?

I would like to find out but i'm in a country that has no netflix :(

I still use Boxee software I downloaded in 2010 on my living room HTPC I built myself. It's ability to organize show and play all downloaded content is unparalleled still. And I love controlling it all with a remote as an app in my iPhone.

I would gladly pay $10/month to use the software, but I would never buy that stupid box with all it's limitations. Yet Boxee did everything to alienate users like me to try to sell those boxes. They discontinued the software, updated the iPhone app to NOT work with the software without the box, etc. Those things generated an outcry from all software users, but Boxee ignored it, because if these are not paying users, then who cares? And no one still bought those boxes anyway.

Lesson is: listen to your most passionate users. You will find a way to turn them into paying users, it's much better strategy than to ignore them and try to co quer new unknown markets.

Have a look at XBMC, boxee was originally (I don't know how much it ended up that way in the end) on it. I believe there's also remote apps for XBMC like that too. If that's not to your liking, Plex (also based on XBMC) has a number of UI changes/improvements to help keep things organized.

I liked it because it had a passable file navigation view. I never really liked how it auto-detected files, and i was far too lazy at the time to organize my growing collection. After boxee stopped supporting the software, i finally replaced it with a proper plex setup.

I honestly think that the plex media server is the absolute 100% totally correct way to develop a system like this, and it will only get better over time. It's why Plex is so amazingly suited to having clients for smart tv's, or roku or mobile ... Hell, i'm even busy putting together a Rasplex (rasplex.com) setup on my raspberry pi.

Also a hint for anyone interested, the default Plex skin is atrocious, and probably puts more people off than anything else. I recommend PlexAeon or Refocus Blue.

Still regularly using my 1st gen Boxee box and in many ways I prefer it to XMBC. It's fairly solid and reliable, the UX is excellent. XBMC had a much clunkier and inconsistant UI - plus all the messing around with Linux distros or other host OS's made it much less appliaance-like.

I'm planning to play with Android TV sticks next but I think they are still pretty immature at this stage. However - it is a platform rather than an app so I think it can evolve quicker to fill the TV niche. I find it incredible that Google is doing so little themselves to help it.

I only use my Boxee Box as a Netflix device today. We simply can't get all the over-the=air channels where we live. And for some reason, Boxee is antagonistic to Aereo.

What I think the world wants is the ultimate cut-the-cord solution. Boxee could have been that.

Outside of everything, that boxee remote was one of the nicest designs.

except for the fact that you couldn't tell up from down in the dark because it was symetrical.

It was really annoying when you went to pause, and instead turned netflix on.

That is very true. I would like to see a remote like that with a slight bump on 'up'. Outside of the symmetrical design, I love the idea of a small keyboard on the bottom.

I gave up on those walled-garden crippled-pc set-top boxes and just took an old pc, hooked up the HDMI port to the living room TV, added a wireless mouse, and all was well with my family.

They have completely stopped watching regular TV. They now watch YouTube Videos, Foreign films, can play games on Steam, and Stream European cable tv nearly 24/7. Everything from bittorrent to youtube to netflix to Amazon to whatever can be played on a PC. Music and Video Games included. My Home Theatre PC is on 24/7.

The reason these Set top boxes like (GoogleTV AppleTV Boxee) keep failing is because they're just crippled PCs. It's not about the UI, it's the freedom, it's the usefulness. People will take something useful and ugly over something useless and shiny. Why get a set top box when you can just watch things on your laptop? What's the point? You want to watch on your big screen tv? Then hook it up using an HDMI cable to your big screen tv. Or grab your tech savvy son or daughter and have them hook up an old pc to the big screen tv.

When it comes to filling up the gap, I am surprised that Xbox was not mentioned particularly given how much Microsoft has tried to portray it as a complete living room entertainment package as opposed to just a gaming console.

It could be if you didn't have to pay for XBox live to connect to the net. However, if you're not a (social) gamer, XBox live offers no benefit over a straight internet connection and costs $60/year.

As soon as my year is up, I'm moving back to a PC for streaming Netflix, and if I'm doing that, the PC might as well play all my local media as well so the XBox is going to be a games-only platform.

What sort of power would the XboxOne hum along at? I figure it would be a power drain. I once considered getting a Wii to turn into a media centre as it is meant to sip rather than burn juice.

Electricity in the UK costs so much, that even leaving appliances on standby soon adds up, we worked out that turning the things off at the wall saves us £1.50 a week, and we don't even have many appliances.

It's very simple why Boxee failed. Have you tried the product? Did you not notice that Boxee restricted where you could go? Boxee had a built-in list of domains you couldn't visit, no doubt to encourage you to settle for the domains with which it had licensing agreements. Read the fine print on the box and you will see.

I couldn't access YouTube! I returned my unit to the store where I bought it, and made sure the manager understood what he was selling.

Boxee was a despicable concept, insidiously controlling where you could and could not go. I now use a $300 laptop to watch what I want, when I want, on my 42" screen.

I use my Boxee Box daily and I haven't noticed any of this. Do you mean via the web browser? Unless this is something specific to the Boxee 2?

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