Boxee TV Review

It’s not very often that I am so excited for a product that I go get it on launch day. Usually I am a skeptic who waits at least for a few reviews to come out before rushing out to get whatever it is. The Boxee TV however was one of those products I had very high hopes for and wanted to spend as much as it would take to try it out for myself (I had $325 saved up just for this). I have debated for the past year to buy the original Boxee Box +live TV tuner but after years of using an HTPC and cable DVR I couldn’t bring myself to live by TV schedule anymore.

Here is how I feel about it after my short period of time with the device. Sorry for the length of this review, but I really wanted to discuss all of the pros and cons I found with the device.

Intro

First of all, if you’re not familiar with the Boxee TV you should really just go to Boxee’s website and read about it for yourself. Basically the device is an internet set top box (STB) that also plugs into your unencrypted cable or over the air (OTA) antenna for live TV. The Boxee TV has internet apps like Netflix, Vudu, Youtube (and I’m sure many more to come).

The killer feature that sets it apart is of course its live TV (dual tuners) and cloud DVR. The DVR functionality stores your recordings in Amazon AWS and allows you to have unlimited recording space (so long as you subscribe for $14.99 /mo) an also allows you to place-shift your recordings while you’re not at home.

Hardware

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The Boxee TV hardware is smaller than I expected. It’s about the size of a VHS cassette (if anyone remembers how big those are) and HDMI, power, 10/100 ethernet, 2 USB, and 1 coax input. There are no buttons on the front and once the device is plugged in it automatically gets powered on.

The remote feels a little cheap but gets the job done. It has a normal d-pad with center select button, a play/pause button at the top, a home, back, …, and dedicated Netflix and Vudu buttons on the bottom.

With a STB that is designed to watch and record live TV I found it strange that a remote would be missing a dedicated record button. I supposed it could be added in the … menu but still not quite as intuitive for less technically savvy.

I did have one problem with the remote an that was that it doesn’t work with my Monoprice IR blaster. I reached out to support (more on that later) and found that the Boxee TV uses RC-MM for its IR protocol. This protocol, however, is not very common in the IR Blaster world because it is fairly new so you may have problems getting an IR blaster to work. Tom helped me out and said I should look for an IR blaster that works with AT&T U-verse because they use the same remote protocol.

The second thing I noticed about the hardware was it got really hot when watching TV (or recording). So hot that I couldn’t swap out the antenna because the plug was too hot to touch. I grabbed an IR thermometer and read 144 F which was pretty shocking. Because the device doesn’t work with my IR blaster, I just have to make sure no one accidentally touches it while it’s out on my entertainment center.

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Setup

Setting up the device was mostly uneventful. I did however run into two problems. First, I could not get the Boxee TV connected to my wifi. It could see the network just fine but would not accept the WPA2 password for access. Once I plugged in ethernet the device was fine. I haven’t attempted to connect to my wi-fi after the software update, but I’d recommend if you have ethernet near your TV, use it because this thing uses a lot of bandwidth.

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Second problem was the fact that the setup code provided to me would not work. You are shown a code and then instructed to go to boxee.tv/setup to register the box for your account. I went to the site and my login wasn’t working. Then I realized that OLD Boxee accounts (for the Boxee Box and legacy Boxee software) don’t work with the Boxee TV. I made a new account and still couldn’t register. I ended up restarted the device 4 times until a code let me register on my newly created account.

Once registered it was time to scan for channels. I tried two different scans, one with the antenna that came with the device and one with the antenna I have installed in my attic. I knew my attic antenna would get better signal but I wanted to try both anyway.

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If you have the option to use a better antenna, you probably should. With my attic antenna I got 26 of the 27 broadcast channels available (although CBS is useless). With the included antenna I got 17 out of the 27 broadcast channels.

I will note that the channels scans were incredibly fast (faster than my typical HTPC tuners) and faster than any TV’s ATSC scan I’ve used.

Software

The software feels a little sparse. Not only were there only a handful of apps, but the recordings and live TV functionality seems very lacking. Let’s start with live TV and recordings.

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There’s no traditional guide layout, while you do get guide data from Boxee, not everything has information or nice cover pictures. Popular TV shows do but with only a couple dozen channels, I expected to have more information filled out.

The guide is broken up into on now, and then as you scroll down you can see what’s on in 30 minute chunks. This interface was neat for thinking outside of the box, but is no where near as efficient and a traditional grid. And when I want to see what’s on at a glance, the 30 minute rows showing 5 channels at a time took a while to get an idea for what is on for the next hour.

Looking ahead to what is on TV doesn’t matter all that much though because even if you did find something you want to watch, there’s no way to record the show from the guide. You have to go to your computer, log into the Boxee website, find the show on the grid, and start your recording from there. Hopefully that gets fixed in the future but as I said before, if I were to give this system to my parents, a dedicated record button on the remote would be better.

Once watching a show, channel changing was really fast but currently you can’t pause live TV nor can your skip back/forward in a show. From the popup it appears this functionality will be coming, it’s just missing in the initial release.

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You can pull up the un-handy guide with the left/right arrows and find something new to watch if you no longer want the channel you’re on, but I couldn’t find a way to see what’s on next.

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One weird thing I couldn’t find was a way to stop live TV playback. If I push home or back the home menu would just overlay on top of the playing show. The only way I figured out how to make the TV stop playback was to go into one of the apps or hit the dedicated Netflix or Vudu buttons. This however sometimes had undesired results with an error message displayed on the screen.

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Recordings worked well but there is a lack of settings that will drive any HTPC user mad. First of all, you cannot set a beginning or end time for recordings. This led to more than one show having the beginning or end cut off. I can’t even imagine how bad that would be for people who record sports regularly.

Second, as I mentioned before, all recordings are done via the web page which is not a great experience and down right terrible from a phone or tablet (I used the Nexus 7). If there were a mobile app to manage this it could help quite a bit. The web interface has a better grid style guide but only has about 2 days worth of data so if the show you want to record isn’t coming up soon, you may have difficulty finding it.

The search is less than stellar, but if you type in the exact query, you shouldn’t have too much trash in your results. The below example of New Girl returned 388 results.

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Most of the time the streaming recordings look fine going back to the Boxee TV but I did have a couple occasions when playback looked particularly bandwidthy. I’m sure trying to show this fact in a scaled down image taken with my iPhone in less than optimal lighting will be hard to convey, but I can guarantee you Fox never looked this bad while viewing live TV.

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Because the recordings are constantly being uploaded/streamed I would never recommend the Boxee TV to anyone who did not have fast internet or had bandwidth caps. I have FiOS (15/5) and most of the time I’d say the playback quality was higher than Netflix (not all that hard to do) but below what Vudu HDX usually has.

Here is an average month of internet usage for me (I stream a lot of Netflix).

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And here is my same internet on drugs with a Boxee TV.

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In the month of October I uploaded 16 Gb of information. That’s a lot. In 2 days with the the Boxee TV I uploaded 81 Gb!

Moving on to the apps, I only played with Netflix, Vudu, and YouTube. There are others, but more importantly are some that I find missing. Amazon VOD is absent, probably because Walmart owns Vudu and is partnering to sell the Boxee TV, and so is NFL Sunday Ticket, NHL GameCenter, Hulu Plus, and Revision 3. I know most people probably don’t care, but I regularly watch Revision 3 and thanks to a friend, watch NFL Sunday Ticket most every Sunday. I’ve already reached out to Revision 3 and I’m hopeful they’ll come to the platform. For now I satisfy my Rev3 and Verge video feeds with the YouTube app.

Speaking of which, the three apps I did try are almost identical to the PS3 apps which is both a good and bad thing. It’s good if you don’t have a PS3, it’s bad if you do because the apps are redundant.

In all fairness the Boxee TV is much better and handling remote inputs (so long as you don’t need the IR blaster) and the PS3 is three times the price and you’d still want to buy a remote or $60