Confirmed: approximately 200K Boxee Boxes were sold

[tronbrain]

Avner Tweets: approximately 200K Boxee Boxes sold.

That confirms what Idan Cohen said a few weeks back in the interview, though Idan's number was thru end-of-2011.

Jank0 Roettgers writes about these numbers in this article here.

Jank0 thinks the 200K number is disappointingly low. He mentions that D-Link just announced another device called the "MovieNite Box" for $60, that streams Netflix and a few other services. Not intended to compete with their Boxee Box offering.

PCMag.com: $60 D-Link MovieNite Box Offers 1080p Streaming for Less

The MovieNite will connect to four services: the Netflix movie subscription service, Walmart's Vudu individual movie-rental service, YouTube, and Pandora.

[Lee_Machine]

Wow that's it? Of course it might have been higher if D-Link actually marketed the thing and sold it in the stores they mentioned at the Boxee 1.0 launch.

I bought my BBox when they came out and it's been running strong since day-1.

[LewisFamily01]

So 200,000 D-Link Boxee Boxes, and over 1.8M Boxee Download users...(but which have just been let go)

How many Iomega Boxee sales?

I question now the ability for Boxee to secure sufficient recurring revenues from its SW or its "Screen Retail Estate" for the advertising "featurettes".

(I presume Boxee gets paid for SW upgrades by its HW partners, as that would explain why Iomega Boxee is still on 1.2)

We have to remember that 200,000 Boxee Boxes is not 200,000 households. I have 4 for instance and there are many other Boxee enthusiasts with multiple Boxees.

I fear that if Boxee doesn't start reaching the mass market it will struggle. A big shame. Whats needed is for Boxee to secure those partnerships with smaller cable companies in the US it spoke off, that could potentially help with the numers...

...Peter

[nfodiz]

It's a shame the number is so low. I think had they kept the box open and not locked it down to get content partners it would have been a much higher number. The Dev community could have had a field day with this hardware. Could you imagine in we could run XBMC on this thing, it would have sold HUGE. Boxee is in the money making game so obviously they needed to lock the box down and get content partners to keep the money coming in. I'm surprised some hardware company out there hasn't tried to partner with XBMC and put out a box. Of course I'm sure there are alot of people out there that bought the box for Netflix/VUDU/etc as well but there are many cheaper solutions out there such as Roku for that. My main purpose for this box has always been to stream my local content, as it has the best looking interface of any box out there and let's you quickly get to your media. I'm afraid users like me have suffered because of Boxee's content partnerships. Sure I fire up Netflix on my Boxee from time to time, but what good is the app when it blasts you out of your chair a half hour into the movie. I have moved on to another box for my online streaming as it has more content providers and Netflix works flawlessly. And that's all I got to say about that...

[aaronwt]

So 200,000 D-Link Boxee Boxes, and over 1.8M Boxee Download users...(but which have just been let go)

How many Iomega Boxee sales?

I question now the ability for Boxee to secure sufficient recurring revenues from its SW or its "Screen Retail Estate" for the advertising "featurettes".

(I presume Boxee gets paid for SW upgrades by its HW partners, as that would explain why Iomega Boxee is still on 1.2)

We have to remember that 200,000 Boxee Boxes is not 200,000 households. I have 4 for instance and there are many other Boxee enthusiasts with multiple Boxees.

I fear that if Boxee doesn't start reaching the mass market it will struggle. A big shame. Whats needed is for Boxee to secure those partnerships with smaller cable companies in the US it spoke off, that could potentially help with the numers...

...Peter

Mass market? Even with higher volume streamers like the ATV and Roku, it's still a niche market. Your average person has no clue how to even setup a wireless network.

I don't know why the 200K figure is a surprise. It's a niche market. Even for the bigger guys like Apple and Roku.

[a_team]

200K - Not surprised... Perhaps if they had fixed a lot of their issues before coming out to the public then the product would have gotten better word-of-mouth support instead of the "It's awesome, BUT ... this doesn't work, it sometimes does this, this is fixed but it waiting some update by some kernel in the military that hasn't been released yet but was supposed to be since V1.2"

Using Boxee I've felt like I'm a Beta-tester everyday - discovering new bugs, new crashes. Not something that everyone wants to sign up for. Anyone who asks about Boxee; I tell them that unless they're techy and hate Apple, don't bother. Otherwise, get ATV and if you don't like it, hack it with XBMC.

They have come a long way, but it's just becoming a product that is sell-able for the general public. But they're image isn't that great yet... The only way to save it would be a Boxee V2.0 - New Hardware, New Software, Forget about the past. I'm just glad it's a Boxee unit - Not an aeroplane or the crashes would have chewed up half the american population.

[MikeW]

I agree that this number isn't too surprising given the price point and the number of bugs it still has after so long on the market. This also explains why the Boxee Box isn't a priority for some of the content providers.

It's over. I don't see how a Boxee Box 2 will be more successful unless it's priced <$100 and even then they will be too late to the game.

[LewisFamily01]

The surprise to me, is that if we assume that Boxee gets its revenue sources from content providers, or from advertising real estate etc, then if they only have 200,000 Boxee Box sales, then why cut off the 1.8M other Boxee installations which can provide them revenue?

I could understand focusing on the Boxee Box only if the numbers were higher.

Or if there was something in the pipeline which would be a much more mass market product (e.g. a STB provided by a Cable company etc).... we have heard rumour of this in the past, but nothing for months, whats the status???

Whilst this market is a niche, as a business it surely needs to be a niche with at least a factor of 10 extra sales in the plan.

If you want content providers on the Boxee, then you must have enough of a market potential to attract them. And this is made worse in that the 200,000 units are not all sitting in the US. So APP development etc as we have seen with the NetFlix debarcle isn't as simple as design once and reach all units.

I totally agree with some of the previous comments, in that if you want mass market then you need both stability and simplicity. I think its clear that Boxee has been interested in the later (although could perhaps do more here, e.g. have having an online user manual for instance built into the Boxee so that users can understand the settings etc. by selecting "HELP", and by tidying up the settings options, grouping together related settings instead of some being under General, some under System, some under Media etc.)

As now all TVs, BluRays etc are becoming internet enabled and Wifi capable, getting a Boxee setup and connected to the Internet should be no harder for a dummy than to follow a wizard.

Then for the slightly more informed dummy, there should be a Network Source wizard which would scan your network, find sources, identify the file types and then provide options which could be set up as sources.

All more complex functionality such as EDID, Beta releases, editing IP addresses, and manually setting up sources etc could all be hidden behind an "ADVANCED" setting option which most dummies stay well clear of. How many of the issues on the Jira/Forum are related to user error in setting it up I wonder.

There could also be improvements in that some of the default settings could be changed, e.g. Webserver etc should not be enabled by default.

Anyway, I am diverging...

My fear now is that Boxee is struggling to find a mass appeal. And without it, it will have a slow death. Obviously as the Flash vs HTML5 issue becomes less of an issue with more sites moving over to HTML5, the Boxee increases in strength again, but the question is how long will this take? Will the user base have deserted Boxee before then?

And then with new platforms such as Google TV, and new standards such as Youview etc coming out Boxee needs to be able to stay abreast and competitive.

The really sad thing is that there are many ways of improving the customers perception of the Boxee, all utilising the capabilities of its current HW platform and current kernel. Just look at the Jira to see how many people would love to have Music and Photos back in focus. Not just on the home screen, but to have some very simply bugs which have been present from Day 1 to be fixed. Its a lack of movement on many of these simple issues which is reducing people's faith in the product and without word of mouth Boxees won't fall off the shelves.

The real question now would be, what is the growth rate per month. Has it slowed down recently? Are we even seeing signs of negative growth as Boxee Boxees are disconnected?

And then what secret plans do our friends at Boxee have up their sleeves, as I for one truly hope they do have something mind blowing hidden away just awaiting an announcement....Something to bring life back into this community and put the Boxee back at centre stage.

...Peter

[aaronwt]

Could there be anything mind blowing? i would expect them to follow the route of others like Google. Since Intel abandoned the platform that the Boxee Box is based on. You wouldn't think they would want to deal with Intel again after that.

Ultimately though I wouldn't care what platform they use as long as they improve on the features of existing one with new hardware while keeping the old features as well. As well as eliminating some of the persistent bugs that plague people.

[nfodiz]

@Marcel

I see you lingering in here... Any thoughts you would like to share