Saying Goodbye: The Boxee Box

It sold, it sold, it finally sold! I've managed to sell off my old Boxee Box media player. 

I can remember when I learned of the D-Link Boxee Box in 2010. A friend of mine showed me an article about it, and I recall immediately being impressed with the device's remote. It had a navigational button that allowed you to move a cursor or on-screen selector in the four cardinal directions, but when you flipped the remote over, it had a full QWERTY keyboard! That was awesome to me because trying to type in text on a TV is typically one of civilization's shittiest experiences, superseded only by dealing with lawyers and car salesmen. The remote sold me, I knew then that was the device I was going to buy.

And buy it I did. And it was indeed great...at first. The oddly shaped Boxee Box was a visual treat, its flat glossy face looking out from next to the TV. It had connections for HDMI and component cables, and it had an Ethernet port, WiFi, USB ports, and a flash card reader. But the remote was as advertised and really great. 

I used the Boxee to watch Netflix, and also to hook up my portable hard drive of pictures and movies and pump content to my TV. I really liked the device.

But things went downhill from there. Numerous updates came out for the Boxee Box over the next year but they served largely to reduce the device's stability. And then in 2012, the Boxee guys quit on the userbase and ceased supporting the device [webarchive.org]. They'll tell you a different story, but Boxee Box users will tell you the truth: we were abandoned. 

Hardware failures aren't uncommon, you can read on this very blog about some other examples of buyer's disappointment. But getting completely abandoned, less than two years after spending a premium price (I think it was upwards of $250), is a kick in the testicles. I mean, when you are lower on my company rankings then HP, you've really accomplished something. 

To be fair, the Boxee Box device continued to work and I still used it for a couple years. Even today I believe it can still play media files from your connected devices and unless the Netflix API changes have completely invalidated the app on the Boxee Box, it should still play Netflix. But eventually I dropped my use of it when I switched to serving content to my TV from a network attached storage device. For streaming, TVs got smarter and could do apps without needing a Boxee, and the Tivo 4K can stream anything the Boxee could in a smaller device that, as part of a Sling TV promotion, was FREE. So as disappointing as Boxee's demise was, I have recovered.

My Boxee Box went into mothballs on my unused hardware shelf. Until about a year ago when I listed it on eBay as a part of my ongoing effort to declutter. Mostly I've sold my computer and video games and a few books. But after being listed for months, someone finally decided to buy my Boxee, which I had dropped in price from about $40 down to $25, and a pretty far cry from the $200+ I paid. Creative people have found ways to jailbreak/hack the device and make it more useful, and the remote is still as cool as ever. To the guy that got it: good luck, I hope it gives you some happiness. To Boxee: goodbye and good riddance.