Move Over BoxeeBox, Here Comes PopBox

DeviceGuru writes "Following closely on the heels of the December announcement of D-Link's BoxeeBox, Syabas Technology today said it will ship the PopBox, a $129 Internet-based A/V streaming set-top box (STB) in March. Both new gadgets have the potential to give Roku's popular STB a run for its money. All three boxes can deliver a range of Internet-based A/V streaming and social networking services to consumers' TVs. Like Roku's digital video player STB, the PopBox will include Netflix on-demand video streaming when it first ships. D-Link, meanwhile, is rumored to be scrambling to add Netflix streaming support to its BoxeeBox device as well, prior to inaugural shipments of that device. All three run embedded Linux OSes, and all are expected to sell for less than $200."

Comments

Re:could be cool

[TheGratefulNet]

avoid the c200 pch. I have one. its buggy as hell.

development has ceased (for all practical purposes) on the older models. they abandoned them ;(

the company does not have any US engineering and ALL firmware (and hardware, which also has bugs!) is designed overseas. its shows (sorry).

if you can afford to KEEP replacing the shitty PSU in the c200 (it blows on a large percent of owners) then fine. else, you may want to wait for some other box designed by a company with a higher clue factor (so far, none are that much better though, sigh).

c200 is just not worth its price. highly overpriced and you will be a beta tester for at least the next year and a half before it does all it claims it will.

(owner of 2 pch products. fwiw.)

Re:Wait, what?

[TheRaven64]

The reason, that gets glossed over so often here, that netflix uses DRM on it's streaming is that the content owners are quite reasonably concerned about people saving it to their hard disk

No, they're quite unreasonably concerned about people saving it to their disk. Why unreasonable? Because this is a side business for Netflix currently and their main business is renting DVDs. I can copy rented DVDs to my hard disk and recompress them at leisure. Somehow, the fact that I can do this hasn't killed the rental market.

Now, possibly, I could rent every film I will ever want to watch, rip them all, and then cancel my subscription, but that isn't likely as long as more new films keep being made.