Boxee builds box 'for the people' at $99 price point

Boxee has introduced a new set-top Boxee TV box that includes just about everything and anything a non-geek video-minded consumer would want, including the ability to receive Internet streaming video and audio apps, two tuners for antenna and basic cable TV reception and a $14.95 a month unlimited online DVR service.

The new box doesn't include all the things that made the old Boxee Box a favorite of those willing to work to get their video without paying a service provider--including access to about 400 apps and the ability for users to develop their own apps. It also doesn't include the price of that old box, which ran about $230.

This unit, a Boxee spokeswoman told TechNewsDaily, is a device "for the people, by geeks" rather than the old position of a box "for geeks by geeks."

To make way for the new, Boxee is discontinuing the old Boxee Box and simplifying the user experience. The reasoning, company spokeswoman Liz Dellheim told the publication, is as simple as the new box: Boxee's customers, faced with a plethora of applications, used only five apps 90 percent of the time. The new box will launch with those five, including Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), Vudu, YouTube and Vimeo and Pandora music.

Boxee isn't abandoning all the other apps, it's just pushing them off to a later time. It is ditching the idea of letting users create their own apps and it is killing any backward compatibility between the new box and the old one, which was more of a cable-cutter's delight than the new one, which might be more reasonably seen as a cable shaver's delight.

The standout feature of the new box is the online DVR service that lets uses record as much content as they want for $14.99 a month on a month-to-month basis. Users can discontinue service up to a month without losing their recordings and can view those recordings on the Boxee TV as well as anywhere there is Internet service on any device with a Web browser, the story said.

For more:
- TechNewsDaily has this story

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