Boxee Set-Top Box Is On The Way: Watch Out, Cable Companies

Boxee has been on a wild, wild ride since debuting to the world lastyear, and for those looking for new ways to catch more content online,it has become the go-too application. And while it has certainly takenoff, there's still lots of room to grow. One of the main reasons thatit has yet to become a household name outside of the tech community isthe need to have a full fledged PC to run it. And unless you're lookingto hook up a media PC/HTPC in your den, you're probably not going tosee Boxee in your living room.

At least, that was the case up until this week. Out of nowhere, Boxeeannounced that it has located its first-ever hardware partner, whichbasically means that some sort of Boxee set-top box is on the way.Boxee has informed us that more details will be provided on December7th when it reveals its first Beta software. Unfortunately, that meansthat little is known about the box right now. We're guessing that it'llbe something like the Roku box or the Apple TV, but only time will tellwhat the actual design is like.  However, obviously there are any number of small form-factor platforms available on the market today to get this done for the folks at Boxee - perhaps an NVIDIA Ion-based system might do the trick?  In fact, the mock below looks a lot like an Acer Aspire Revo or  maybe it's based on something a bit more powerful?


What could be possibly more important for Boxee is another small (butbig) announcement. We're told that the Boxee software could eventuallybe embedded onto other devices. That means that your DVD player, DVR oreven Blu-ray player could one day have access to Boxee, similar to howsome devices already have access to Vudu and Netflix right now. Cablecompanies best watch out--things are about to get really, reallyinteresting.