venecon fiametta rayley

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Emerio Boykins

unread,

Aug 2, 2024, 6:59:04 AM8/2/24

to sysforeher

With the seemingly never ending price increases for cable TV services, readers are often interested in products that offer the promise of eliminating some or their entire cable bill. The new Boxee TV (BTV), available exclusively at Walmart or at the Boxee web site, could be the right solution for some, but will fall short of being a total solution for many.

The Boxee TV is yet another $99 internet media streamer. Like many media streamers, including the recently compared NETGEAR NeoTV and the Roku 2XS, Boxee TV has both Ethernet and wireless network connections. BTV unique value-proposition are its dual OTA (over the air) HDTV tuners to let you view live broadcast TV or unencrypted basic cable signals provided by your cable provider.

The rear panel of the Boxee TV has a number of triangular shaped holes for ventilation. You also find similar ventilation holes covering the majority of the bottom of the device as well as about a third of the top of the device. Even so, the Boxee TV feels quite warm to the touch, though Boxee assures me that it falls within CE heat standards.

After creating and signing into your account, you enter the five digit PIN code that appears on your TV screen. This activates your device and links it to your account. During the account setup process, you are prompted for credit card info to pay for any premium services, such as video rentals or the DVR feature. You have the option of skipping this step.

This menu choice lets you view live TV signals off the air or from unscrambled cable. The available channels in the figure above are from an antenna scan. You can scroll through the channels and click on the key in the center of the navigation rectangle to go to the channel. You also have the option of scrolling down and seeing the schedule lineup for your available channels for the next two time slots.

For my tests, I played back the same recordings (not at the same time) on the Boxee TV device and via my.boxee.tv web site on both my desktop computer and my iPad. On all devices, I noted that at the start of playback, there are some video and audio dropouts as well as times that both the video and audio pause briefly. There are also times when a section of program content is skipped completely.

I had the best playback and fewest interruptions using my desktop. The Boxee TV and the iPad playback experience were approximately the same. I also noted that running the same test at different times during the day yielded either better or poorer results. In general, however, after the first minute or two of watching a recording, video streaming stabilized and the recordings were very watchable on all three platforms. This leads me to believe that there might be some buffering or back-end issues.

Compared to the 263 apps currently included on the Boxee Box, the 12 apps included with the Boxee TV seem almost an afterthought in comparison. The included apps are: AccuWeather; Cloudee; File Browser (for viewing content on attached USB devices); MLB.tv; Pandora; Spotify; TED; vimeo; WSJ Journal and the three featured apps of Netflix, vudu HD and YouTube. When you first scroll over to the Apps icon and select it, the three featured apps appear. To get to the other nine apps, you scroll down one line.

When you launch the File Browser app, your first choice is to select an attached USB device. Thereafter, you are presented with a folder view of your attached storage device. These are the supported files according to Boxee: