Major Device Strategy Remix for Boxee, Heads to the Cloud
Since the future is in the cloud, Boxee, the start-up company that delivered streaming Web video to TVs via their quirky-shaped Boxee Box, is introducing a new DVR box that would store content in the cloud.
The Boxee TV allows users to record videos from both free and paid TV, and users won’t ever have to worry about deleting unwatched series–everything will be saved in the cloud, for a price of course. The unlimited recording would cost $15 per month while the Boxee TV would cost only $99, a far cry from the price of the Boxee Box of $179.
Boxee will no longer produce Boxee Box and Live TV Tuner, but they will continue to offer support for the products. Boxee puts the emphasis on offering free TV to everyone with or without a paid cable subscription, but that still depends on the availability of free channels on the market. Only about 30 percent of U.S. households across 8 markets will be able to use DVR on Boxee TV. And Hulu and Hulu Plus, HBOGo, or Comcast Xfinity, aren’t available on Boxee. The cloud storage part is a big plus, but the channel limitation is a huge drawback.
A clouded market
Speaking of video storage devices, Comcast may be close to launching their very own cloud-based DVR when they filed trademark applications for the brands DEEPDRIVE and AIRBASE which involves “storing, broadcasting, downloading and streaming of audio and video programming selected by users for viewing on demand via cloud computing networks; digital video recorder (DVR) services via cloud computing networks; mobile media services in the nature of electronic transmission of entertainment media content.”
Also, TiVo is seeing the benefits of using the cloud for analytics when they purchased TRA over the Summer. They want to use cloud analytics in order to deliver a better service to subscribers. TiVo also knows that there is great potential in cloud-based DVRs but they realized that it would be difficult to wean subscribers from using traditional DVRs as subscribers would have to backup saved content to an external hard drive, which not every household has.
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