When was boxee last updated

Major complaints would go unaddressed for months. Worst of all, major complaints would go unaddressed for months, and then the carpet would be pulled out from under the feet of users as the software with the problem would suddenly no longer be supported at all.

Smart support people and community managers can do an awful lot to help the image of a software company. No disc needed! Then again, console users are pretty in love with the disks they own these days, so who can say if even a perfectly shaped message could have gotten through. As the old saying goes, you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. The pig was just too ugly from the get-go.

This one is short and sweet. Every organization has its base: the people who love the product no matter how ugly it is. The one thing you never do is abandon your base. You may try to push your base in a direction. Instead, the most informative number in my opinion is Facebook fans. On August 12, , Boxee had 20, facebook fans. XBMC had 14, fans. Indications were that Boxee was doing quite well. And then, over the next five months, Boxee did not update its software, and users were becoming increasingly frustrated both by the lack of any update and by the lack of communication concerning the reason for the delay.

On December 26th, , Boxee dropped its first bomb. They announced that there would only be one update of the HTPC software released, and then all support for the original, software version of Boxee would be suspended indefinitely.

On October 16th, , less than a year later, Boxee officially burned another bridge, discontinuing support for the Boxee Box. So what happened to their users? Boxee pulled the rug out from under their base twice, and still managed to pick up 8k fans. XBMC maintained a steady pace of iterative, transparent development and managed to roughly triple its Facebook fan base over the same period. Boxee was, at one time, an organization ahead of its time.

All indications were that it had the opportunity to really change the world for the better. In the end, it seems that the only thing that ever really held it back was its own very, VERY poorly managed development decisions.

I firmly believe a company that intelligently pursues the path that Boxee followed can make absolute buckets of money and at the same time can make a legion of cordcutters and cord-nevers very happy. But now that I've extolled how great it is to use, I have to also point out the Boxee Box's open source troubles.

In the Boxee blog on April 19, Tom Sella posted:. Without it, we would not have been inspired to build Boxee in the first place. That's the spirit I like to hear, but the reason for the post was over the Boxee Box being locked up hardware. The problem from Boxee's point of view is that in order to deliver premium content, there had to be some compromises on their original mission. On the other side, customers point out that Boxee CEO Avner Ronen said the goal was to make the Boxee Box "hacker friendly," which it definitely is not.

You'll have a lot more flexibility if you download the Boxee software or any HTPC software and put it on your own hardware. With a Boxee Box, what it ships with is what you get. The basic issue outside of the possible GPL violation is a promise-and-delivery problem. A hackable box was promised. A hackable box was not delivered. Beyond the community that has the capability and interest to hack such a device, this little box is a nearly perfect example of open source software making its way into a piece of hardware that even the most non-technical home user can plug in and get started using.

Some of the Boxee critics are throwing stones at the profit involved. There's nothing wrong with making profit when open source is involved. But I'm OK with that. Everything in the world isn't going to be free-as-in-beer.

Being paid for your work is not a crime. If you've been paying for cable channels you never watched, why would you object to paying for the things you actually do want to watch?

And all that said, we ditched cable and satellite a year ago and started making our way through various alternatives. It was the best thing we ever did, and Boxee is the best solution we've found so far.

It's hard to argue with more efficient entertainment, and the Boxee Box makes that efficient entertainment even easier to get. Sometimes you compromise. I own a Boxee Box. The Boxee devs actually recommend regular e. So what's your point? Nice review. One thing that might seriously effect Boxee marketability at least in the rest of North America , is the issue of no Hulu north of the border. No different than any other online streamer, though. I don't believe Roku can stream Hulu in Canada either I wonder how much of this content is blocked from Canada and other international locations.

View all reviews ». AllThingsD by Writer. Walt Mossberg. Kara Swisher. John Paczkowski. Katherine Boehret. Peter Kafka. Arik Hesseldahl.