![]() ![]() That makes it a great option for households where some people just want to watch TV and other people want to be able to stream Netflix, watch YouTube videos, or surf the web on the big screen. You could literally hook Google TV up in your house and nobody would notice that it’s there. The end result is a TiVo interface that works just like it normally does and, when I want it, a Google TV interface that I can bring up over the top of TiVo when I want to do something more advanced than TiVo offers. So in my case, Comcast goes into the back of my TiVo box, the HDMI output from my TiVo box goes into the HDMI input on the Logitech Revue, and then the HDMI output on the Logitech Revue goes into the HDMI input on my TV. This is crucially important and is the fundamental difference between Google TV and everything else that’s out there. It sits between your cable box and your television set and acts as a layer over the top of however you normally watch TV. Your cable box, for instance, connects to the primary input on your TV and when you want to watch something on your Apple TV, you switch to input two. The standard internet-connected TV box connects to an auxiliary input on your TV and exists separately from however you normally watch TV-TiVo, your cable company’s DVR, over-the-air, etc. It does some of the same things that those boxes do, but it does a whole lot more. Google TV is not like Apple TV or Boxee or Roku or any of those boxes that connect to your television set. It sets a standard that potential competitors should closely emulate with future products. Whether Google TV as a platform ultimately succeeds or fails doesn’t matter as much as the method with which Google has fused TV and the web together. Well, bullish on the concept of Google TV and how it integrates with the current way most people consume television and the way we’ll all consume television in the future. But it’s hard not to notice just how much the rebrand helps Boxee when it comes to wiping away negative publicity.Follow bullish on Google TV. I also noticed that neither negative review is on the first page of Google searches for “ Cloud DVR” or “ Boxee Cloud DVR.”īoxee hasn’t yet responded to my requests for comment, and without hearing its side of the story, I don’t want to declare anything truly malicious. Having both scathing Boxee TV reviews on the very first Google search page probably didn’t help sales much (Boxee hasn’t discussed any sales figures yet). Its been available since last month, but browser-maker Opera has only today confirmed that its Opera Devices Software Development Kit is providing the backend for the Boxee TVs HTML5 apps. It helps that “Cloud DVR” reviews will be ranked completely differently from Boxee TV reviews on search engines. With the rebrand, I have a feeling we’ll finally see more reviews rolling out soon. In a conversation around my review in December, Avner Ronen, Boxee’s founder and chief executive, mentioned that the company was purposefully waiting on the review program until all of the device’s bugs were ironed out. ![]() ![]() That’s because Boxee still hasn’t kicked off its official review program even though we’re now five months past the device’s launch. Aside from my review and Popular Science‘s (both incredibly negative), there aren’t any other in-depth reviews of the Boxee TV online. The rebrand will likely help Boxee side-step much of the negative press around the initial Boxee TV launch. And even though the Cloud DVR feature is cool in theory, it’s not as easy to use as typical DVRs (for example, you can’t fast-forward or rewind content easily, and you can’t pause live TV). It was slow and surprisingly buggy at times. That’s probably a wise move - as I mentioned in my review, the Cloud DVR simple didn’t hold a candle to existing media players. Now you’ll have access to five hours of DVR playback and 90 days of storage without paying a dime instead of paying $10 a month for the unlimited Cloud DVR.īoxee believes the rebrand will help its set-top box stand out from other media players from Roku and Apple, GigaOm notes. Boxee is also adding a new free tier to its Cloud DVR service, which makes the device’s core feature usable (albeit in a very basic way) for people averse to any sort of monthly fees. The change is a clear effort to focus on the $99 device’s most unique feature: storing unlimited television recordings on Boxee’s servers. ![]()
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