At the Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, Boxee revealed that D-Link has been named first choice as the hardware partner to release a Boxee Box – Boxee branded set-top box.
The device brings HDMI-support, WiFi, Ethernet, an SD card slot and two USB 2.0 ports. It also comes with optical audio, RCA audio and RF remote and plays any non-DRM media.
According to the companies, the Boxee Box, which has already won a Best of Innovations award from the Computer Electronics Association, “reinterprets what TV should be, delivering all the movies, TV shows, music and photos from a user’s computer, home network and Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed.”
The full product will be shown at CES 2010 and it is supposed to hit the store shelves in Q2 2010 for about $200.
Boxee social media center, and its free, open source downloadable enables to stream content from websites like Netflix, MLB.TV, Comedy Central, Pandora, Last.fm, and flickr.
Boxee is in public Alpha for Mac, Linux, and Windows. This Monday the company launched the Beta and plans to open it up to the public on Jan 7th (also at CES).
The company say its eventual goal is to let users integrate Boxee into their existing devices (TVs, game consoles, STB, and DVD/Blu-Ray players) where possible or to buy a Boxee Box if their existing hardware can’t run it.
After launching in June of 2008, boxee has nearly 700,000 Alpha testers. In addition, dozens of content providers have built applications for their content on Boxee and a 3rd party developer made boxee available for the Apple TV.
In 2009, the company hopes to reach 1 million users across computers, AppleTVs, and other devices that can be connected to a television.
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