The Boxee Box Review

The Main Event: Shows

I canceled my digital cable subscription over a year ago. I never had time to watch shows when they aired, I always ended up DVRing them. By the time I got around to watching the shows I’d recorded, they were already available on the web and in some cases it was more convenient for me to watch them on my computer (I could watch while testing, for example). I’d get more entertainment out of holding public burnings of my $70 every month than paying Time Warner, so I canceled my digital cable package. The content I wanted to watch was on the web already by the time I was ready to watch it, I just needed a good way of aggregating it.

Netflix got me my fix for a lot of stuff. I don’t necessarily use it too much for movies (image quality isn’t high enough on a large projected screen) but for catching up on old TV shows it works well. The main benefit is instant streaming. It works on virtually every device I have hooked up to a TV and it works well.

The Netflix analog for newer TV, I’d guess, is Hulu. Unfortunately Hulu doesn’t work on every device I have hooked up to a TV and if you want to get Hulu on a non-PC device you pretty much have to sign up for Hulu Plus at $8 per month for roughly the same content I already get for free on the web. I’d rather strangle myself.

Could Boxee fill the void in my mindless content consumption? No, not completely at least.

Boxee approaches the problem with the best intentions. Select the Shows hub from the home screen and you’re immediately dropped into a clean listing of the 1000+ most popular TV shows available on the web. Each show is represented by a poster although you can switch to list view by toggling the icon in the upper right. It doesn’t matter where the shows are located, whether on the web or on your network, Boxee aggregates them all and presents them to you like a very cool TV guide channel.

Flip the remote over and begin typing the name of the show you’re looking for to bypass scrolling and begin searching. The search results take a couple of seconds to pop up. The Box isn’t as fast as a modern PC running Boxee’s software.

Like most hubs in Boxee the Shows view is simply for content consumption, you can’t configure the view or sort from here. If you bring up the dropdown menu you can choose to view TV shows by popularity, recently added, alphabetically, by genre or even by cable network.

Pick the show you want and the Boxee interface continues to impress. Instead of getting a haphazard listing of episodes the software organizes each available episode into seasons and then chronologically into episodes. Boxee presents a screengrab and synopsis of the episode as you scroll down the list. It’s honestly easier to use than the actual websites the episodes are pulled from.

Select an episode to play and you’re given options for where to play it from if there are multiple sources (e.g. Fancast and Comedy Central may both offer the same show, or you may have a copy of that episode on your network already). Boxee tells you whether or not the source is ad supported, although there’s little you can do about that other than prepare to watch the same ad three or four times while you watch your show. But hey, it’s still better than paying for cable.

As I just mentioned, Boxee doesn’t differentiate between locally stored and web content. You don’t actually know where the content is located until you actually try to play a show. For locally stored video, there’s grey text listed on the screen indicating the path/filename which is useful if you have multiple resolution copies of the same content.

Boxee views itself as a social video platform, so not only can you watch episodes from here but also share them with your friends. This is only useful if you have enabled Twitter/Facebook integration or you have other Boxee users who follow you as well. The latter I believe has the most potential as I’m not sure you want to bother all of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers with everything you like to watch on TV.

You can favorite a show so you won’t have to keep going through the full listing of most popular shows to find what you’re looking for. Favorite enough shows and it’s almost like you finally have your own al-a-carté cable package, for free.

Everything I described up to this point sounds great. Conceptually Boxee is exactly what I wanted. Aggregate TV content on the web and present it in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I’m actually using the web. Unfortunately there are two issues with the Boxee Box in this regard.

First is easily picked up by users of Boxee’s free software: you don’t get as much content:

Boxee Box

Boxee Software

You’ll notice that the major networks aren’t covered. For example, while you can access CBS.com content via downloadable Boxee software, you can’t on the Boxee Box. I’m guessing this is due to Boxee’s deal to bring Hulu Plus to the platform in the future. This flies in the face of Boxee’s purpose however. Selectively aggregating free content and forcing you to pay for content that is freely available on the web sort of defeats the purpose of Boxee.

The second issue is what happens when you actually decide to start watching a show. With the free downloadable Boxee software you get a full screen window of the show you picked to watch. On the Boxee Box however, you get this:

That’s right. Playing (almost) any show on the web takes you to a WebKit based web browser that loads the web page that has the video you’re trying to watch. I’m guessing the default behavior of the Boxee Box is designed to avoid conflicts with content providers. The content owners get a hit on their webpage and the user is exposed to all advertisements.

The Boxee browser’s user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.400.0 Safari/533.9, so most websites should just work with it.

Watching video in a small window on a web page on your TV isn’t exactly glamorous, so Boxee gives you the option of making the video full screen. Hit the menu button on the remote and select the full screen icon to make the video full screen. You don’t have to fiddle with anything within the webpage, just use Boxee’s own widget to enlarge the video. Note that this isn’t necessary on some content. I found that you could watch South Park episodes and have them appear in full screen by default, however anything else from Comedy Central requires you to use the fullscreen widget.

It gets worse. Anything provided by Fancast doesn’t work with Boxee’s fullscreen widget. Instead you need to position your mouse cursor over the embedded video player’s fullscreen button and select it. Thankfully Boxee tries to do this for you automatically when you load the video. You’ll see the mouse cursor snap to the location of the fullscreen button in the video player. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work. If the video is too tall the feature won’t work and sometimes the mouse cursor will snap to a position a couple of inches above the fullscreen button. It’s not always consistent, which is a problem if you share your TV with roommates, family members or guests who don’t know the intricacies of watching TV on a Boxee Box.

The fact that you even have to deal with this sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. And if the Boxee Box worked flawlessly at this point I’d have very little to complain about. It doesn’t.