DVR/PVR

The recently announced Boxee TV is hitting the store shelves of the world's largest retailer, Walmart. The Boxee team was teasing that they had lined up a major exclusive retail partner for the Boxee TV, and it sounds like Walmart won't just be selling the Boxee TV, but will be helping out with some major promotion as well. In all honesty, I had assumed that this retailer would be Best Buy. Walmart is not the first place I think of when buying the latest in tech and gadgets, but it is difficult to understate the mainstream exposure that a Walmart end-cap can bring to a product. If Boxee and D-link can clearly communicate what the Boxee TV does, then this could be a major coup, though the impact of launching in time for the holday shopping season will be lessened by fact that the Boxee TV's cloud-based DVR is only going to be available in select markets at launch.

But now, with the Boxee TV, the startup has pulled off something special (or devilish depending on your view of the retailer) and managed to get the Boxee TV into Walmart.

TechCrunch

There was a time when I would bounce from one media center frontend application to the next, always seeking out the perfect blend of eye-candy, customizability and functionality. One application that continues to find its way to my test system is MediaPortal. The MediaPortal team has been fairly quiet the last several months, but they recently broke cover with a collection of updates. First up, there is a new default skin. MediaPortal 1.3 is still in beta, but one of the more significant features is a new skinning engine. MediaPortal has traditionally started out with a rather crusty XP-era WMC style skin. The new skin is more reminiscent of an Aeon-style skin for XBMC. In other words, it's looking sharp. The team also gave an update on the long in gestation MediaPortal 2. MediaPortal 2 is still quite definitely alpha software, but the intrepid can look forward to the release of the MP2 Autumn Build in the near future.

Finally, because sometimes I enjoy burying the lead, the MediaPortal team has introduced support for CableCARD. The team is being quite up-front that there is no chance of MediaPortal receiving CableLabs certification, so MediaPortal will only be able to provide access to non-DRM channels and "Copy Freely" content, but it is certainly welcome news for Windows-based HTPC owners still pining for the loss of SageTV and looking for an alternative to WMC. The team is also being quite up-front that MediaPortal's CableCARD support is a work in progress and they are looking for testers to help provide feedback for continued development.

Well howdy, folks! We here at MediaPortal have been getting quite a lot of feedback from everyone, and have found that 3 questions keep being asked:

1. Why not a new default skin for MP? The old one is a bit outdated and you have some awesome skinners on the team.
2. Why is getting your non DRM digital cable content into MediaPortal so hard? Specially if you live in the U.S. as Set-Top-Boxes make it even harder.
3. What is the hype with MP2? Why is better? What is it going to look like?

MediaPortal Blog

Images of the Boxee TV leaked last week, along with some early details about what to expect from the Boxee Box successor, but the Boxee TV is now official. As anticipated, the Boxee TV sports two TV tuners that finally add the DVR capabilities that everyone thought the Boxee Live TV would add to the Boxee Box, but the new DVR functionality probably won't be what most people were expecting. The Boxee TV does not come with internal storage for recordings, and though there are two USB ports, external storage is only for local media playback. The Boxee TV will save your recordings to the cloud instead. The cloud-based DVR will cost $15 a month and will be gradually rolled out, starting with 7 major markets at launch and then to other markets based on demand.

The Boxee TV will be a major departure from the Boxee Box, and not just because of the inclusion of DVR functionality. The new device eschews the distinctive cube/pyramid stylings of the original in favor of more traditional rectangular settop box dimensions. The monthly fee is only required for those interested in the cloud DVR; everyone else will appreciate the significantly reduced $99 price tag. Unfortunately, also reduced will be the number of apps available on the Boxee TV. The wide range of apps for accessing online content sources was a distinctive feature of the Boxee software and Boxee Box, but the Boxee TV will only ship a handful of apps for major services such as Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube. The Boxee TV also will not support as wide a range of file types and containers as the Boxee Box for local media playback. Finally, the once-innovative remote control with a QWERTY keyboard on the flip side has been retired in favor of a more traditional remote control.

I suspect the Boxee TV is going to be a tough sell. The $15 dollar monthly fee for the DVR is going to be a tough sell, and heaven forbid you have an ISP with bandwidth limits. Every gigabyte of recorded TV will take 2 gigabytes of your allotted bandwidth; one to go upstream and one to go downstream. Remove the DVR, and the Boxee TV is a less capable iteration of the Boxee Box, and there will be no fleeing to the Boxee Box as it has been discontinued and Boxee is stating that it will not receive anything more than maintenance updates, a prosepct most will find laughable given the abysmal level of support the Boxee Box has received over the last year. Without the launch of the Boxee Live TV, it is unlikely there would have been any updates to the Boxee Box in 2012, an update that dropped in March and came with several major, unresolved issues. It should be interesting to see how long D-Link will give the Boxee team to show that they have a clear vision of the future for cord-cutters.

The Boxee TV attempts to address a large void in the TV segment: DVRs for cord cutters and casual cable subscribers. The D-Link-made set-top box can pull in over-the-air HDTV signals and unencrypted cable signals. The dual tuner setup also allows it to record two channels at once. Built off the lessons learned with the Boxee Box’s Live TV dongle, the Boxee TV includes every feature found in a traditional DVR. Best of all, like TiVo, it’s not tied to the cable provider and even works with over-the-air signals. But, also like TiVo, there is a monthly charge to use the cloud DVR of $14.99 a month. Yeah, that’s a lot.

TechCrunch

AverMedia visited Computex this year with a new product, the AverMedia AverTVBox PVR. The AverTVBox PVR is a bit of an oddity, though I suppose I can see where it might serve a certain niche market. It is a standalone PVR/DVR. It records directly to a connected USB hard drive and accepts analog cable connections or analog settop box connections. There's no mention in the press release of EPG or IR blaster capabilities, so it sounds like direct control recording and manual scheduling is the order of the day. 

The box can record to separate USB devices and output with analog VGA or RCA composite to a monitor or TV. While it appears to be SD-only, if your 20-year old Zenith wants to get in on some PVR time-shifting, it might have found a new best friend.

EngadgetHD