(No) Surprise! Boxee Box Slips To November

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Tim Higgins

Boxee just announced that the Boxee Box by D-Link will not ship until this November.

D-Link provided a heads-up just a few hours ago, saying "the date change is due to the challenge of delivering the Boxee experience on a set top box to play HD videos from the web or the local network in 1080p with a browser experience that can handle almost everything you throw at it, including Flash 10.1 and making this all happen on a small, quiet device."

I have to say that I’m not surprised by this news. I’ve been less than impressed with the Boxee Betas running on various Windows PCs. And while it could be that the Boxee team was focusing more on tweaking performance for the D-Link hardware, perhaps the Windows version is an accurate indicator.

Or maybe Boxee needs more time to try to reach an agreement with Hulu, which has delayed its own pay version that was supposed to start at the end of May. Or to respond to Google TV. Or maybe just to keep fixing more bugs.

At any rate, if you really need your Boxee now, download one of the Betas (Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu and Apple TV flavors are available) and see if you really should be so excited.

The text of the post over at the Boxee Blog follows:

Title: Boxee Box by D-Link Release Set for November in North America

Earlier this week we got confirmation the Boxee Box by D-Link will ship this November in North America. We realize many of you have waited months to purchase the Boxee Box, and we know how frustrating this is. Believe us when we say that both Boxee & D-Link want to start selling Boxee Boxes yesterday.

The original plan was to have the Box out by the end of Q2 (i.e. just about now), but that time-frame proved overly ambitious.

Our vision is to make the Boxee experience on a set top box as good as (and where we can, better than) the one you already know on a PC. The goal is to play HD videos from the web or a local network in 1080p and use hardware acceleration whenever possible. And to provide a TV browser experience that can handle almost everything you throw at it, including Flash 10.1. Not to mention making all this happen for an affordable price and on a quiet device that will not feel obsolete 12 months after you buy it.

With a November launch, D-Link and Boxee have taken the time needed to deliver the product we’ve wanted from the beginning, one that exceeds your expectations and sets the standard for accessing stuff from the Internet and from your home network on your TV.

Moving forward we want to keep you up to date so we will share progress via Boxee’s Development Blog and the Boxee Box by D-Link Fan Page on Facebook.

In the meantime, it feels good to have a date set for the release of the Boxee Box, and we can’t wait to get it to you.

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