Boxee’s Cloud DVR service uses the company’s set-top box to upload live TV recordings to the cloud, which can then be streamed back to the Boxee device as well as to computers and mobile devices. The company offers its users unlimited storage for recorded shows, and is eventually going to charge $10 a month for that service once the company concludes its beta test later this year. A free limited tier will come with five hours of playback time per month.

The initial focus of Boxee’s cloud DVR is over-the-air TV, which can be received for free with an antenna — and that was apparently one of the reasons the rollout in the Bay Area took so long. Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen told me that the company already has a lot of users of its device in the Bay Area, but that it was cautious about rolling out the service because of the area’s unique geography. Via email, he told me:

“We were worried about San Francisco’s numerous hills to begin with, which is why it wasn’t one of our first 8 markets, but now feel like we have enough users there to know the product works well.”

Boxee’s expansion to the Bay Area means that the company’s DVR service is now available in a total of nine markets, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Kippen told me that the company wants to be in 26 U.S. markets by the end of the year.

Boxee first introduced its cloud DVR service and device in November, and at the time still called the set-top box “Boxee TV.” However, the device was rebranded earlier this month to Cloud DVR to put a bigger emphasis on its DVR capabilities. Renaming the device just a few months after launch could be seen as a sign that Boxee is struggling to explain the offering to consumers, many of which aren’t even aware that they can receive HD TV programming over the air.

But the rebranding also suggests that Boxee is looking to work more closely with operators. The company notably toned down its cord cutting rhetoric with the relaunch, and the Boxee Cloud DVR became the first device of its class to support Comcast’s encrypted basic cable feeds. The cable operator started encrypting basic cable in some markets this month, and reached an agreement with Boxee to give the Cloud DVR access to these feeds last year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

Consumers who already use a Comcast-provided set-top box on all of their TV sets don’t have to worry, their service will continue to work as before. But if you have a TV in your den that’s hooked up to your cable outlet without a set-top box, then you’re going to have to get an adapter to keep it working.

Comcast is contacting consumers ahead of the transition, offering them up to two digital TV adapters for free for two years. These adapters are small boxes that come with their own remote control and are connected to a TV set with a coaxial (antenna) cable. Remember the converter boxes that consumers had to buy to receive over-the-air digital TV on old TV sets? It kind of works like that, except the sole purpose of this device is to descramble Comcast’s cable signals.

Comcast confirmed the move towards encrypted basic cable when contacted by GigaOM, and a spokesperson sent us the following statement via email:

“We are beginning to proactively notify customers in select markets that we will begin to encrypt limited basic channels as now permitted by last year’s FCC B1 Encryption Order. While the vast majority of our customers won’t be impacted because they already have digital equipment connected to their TVs, we understand this will be a change for a small number of customers and will be making it as convenient as possible for them to get the digital equipment they may need to continue watching limited basic channels.”

The company is also making a help page available online that goes into some of the details of the offering.

Cable companies have long lobbied for the right to encrypt basic cable channels, arguing that this will prevent cable theft and simplify remote management of their equipment. They succeeded last year when the FCC ruled that they could start to encrypt basic cable, as long as they provide consumers with some help during the transition.

The company also struck a separate agreement with Boxee to provide owners of the Boxee Cloud DVR with access to its encrypted basic feeds — and the new Boxee device also happens to be the first one that’s compatible with a new DLNA-based adapter that streams TV signals via an Ethernet connection.

However, Comcast’s adapters won’t work with Boxee’s old live TV dongle, which the company introduced a little over a year ago to bring live TV to the original Boxee Box. Also left in the dark are customers who use any other kind of digital TV adapter for their PC that are based on coaxial inputs, like the Elgato EyeTV. The last resort for many of these consumers may just be to invest in an antenna.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Boxee’s Cloud DVR now comes with a limited free service tier.

The new Boxee Cloud DVR box offers users unlimited storage for their TV recordings in the cloud. Unlimited playback, as well as the capability to view recordings on computers and mobile devices, costs users $10 a month. The new free service tier offers up ro five hours of DVR playback every month. There is still a free test period while the service is in beta.

So why did Boxee take the unusual step to rebrand a product just months after launch? The company’s VP of communications Andrew Kippen told me Tuesday that the previous name didn’t accurately capture the device’s functionality, letting consumers to believe that it was primarily a media player similar to Apple TV or Roku. The new name is meant to emphasize the DVR functionality as a key differentiator.

However, It’s worth noting that the company’s DVR service is currently just available in eight markets. Kippen told me that the plan is to extend the service to 26 markets by the end of the year, which should cover most of the country.

As part of the rebrand, Boxee seems to also have toned down its cord cutting rhetoric. The company made its ability to replace cable a key selling point when it unveiled its new device last fall, even promising “Free TV” prominently on the Boxee TV packaging.

On its newly-launched website, Boxee instead compares the device to TiVos and cable DVRs, touting unlimited storage and not free broadcast content as the key differentiator. That has likely to do with the fact that Boxee wants to get access to cable content as well. The company struck an agreement with Comcast to access encrypted basic cable signals last year.

That’s a decidedly different path than the one taken by Aereo, which has been battling Comcast’s NBC and other boradcasters in court for its take on cloud TV. Check out our paidContent Live conference in New York next week for a fireside chat with Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia.

Take a look my Boxee Cloud DVR unboxing video below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How consumer media will change in 2013

DLNA will enable Boxee TV owners to play files stored on their computers or network-attached storage drives, a feature that was at the core of Boxee’s original Boxee Box. Boxee TV also functions as a DLNA digital media renderer, meaning that users can beam music and videos straight from their mobile device to their Boxee TV, much in the same way as one would stream a video via Airplay to an Apple TV.

Boxee TV combines apps for online media services like Netflix, YouTube and Spotify with live over-the-air television and a cloud DVR that offers unlimited storage for recorded shows.

Cloud DVR functionality is currently just available in a limited number of markets, and it looks like Boxee was trying to iron out some bugs and add some much-needed features before rolling it out further. One example: Boxee TV users can now schedule recordings directly on the device. Previously, users had to go to Boxee’s cloud DVR website to schedule a recording – a step that seemed overly complicated for a pretty basic feature of a DVR.

Check out my Boxee TV unboxing video below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Boxee TV is Boxee’s second major hardware initiative after the introduction of its original Boxee Box two years ago. The new device, which was introduced earlier this month, comes with a few apps for services like Netflix, Pandora as well as the Walmart-owned Vudu video-on-demand service, and combines those with free over-the-air content that is being accessed via a built-in dual tuner.

Owners of the device will also be able to use it as a DVR, with a twist: Recordings aren’t stored locally, but uploaded to a cloud service that promises unlimited storage. This “No Limits DVR” service will cost consumers $15 per month, and will initially only be available in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and D.C. Boxee has said that it wants to expand the service to additional markets in 2013.

Boxee TV is significantly cheaper than the original Boxee Box, which initially sold for a whopping $250 $199. This is in part because Boxee TV isn’t based on an Intel CPU, as it was the case with the Boxee Box. The new device instead uses the Broadcom BCM7231 chipset, which is significantly cheaper. One downside is that the new Boxee TV device will support slightly fewer codecs for local media playback than the original Boxee Box.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• TV Apps: Evolution from Novelty to Mainstream
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Social-TV apps and consumer behavior

Mac mini, Retina Display on a 13-inch MacBook Pro and iMac upgrades are all in the mix but will they take backstage to a smaller Apple iPad? Hopefully, they’ll help folks forget this week’s EPEAT fiasco. And Kevin talks about the different messages Microsoft and Google are sending out about their respective products: Surface with Windows RT and a $249 Chromebook that runs on smartphone-like chips.

Download

RSS Feed

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

SHOW NOTES:

0:00:00 – 0:05:20 — What’s Boxee’s cloud DVR all about and is it worth it?

0:05:20 – 0:11:00 – A roundup of the latest Apple whispers and iPad Mini thoughts

0:11:00 – 0:13:30 – Maybe EPEAT certification isn’t all that after all

0:13:30 – 0:16:30 – Microsoft’s reasons for Surface haven’t really…. surfaced

0:16:30 — 0:21:30– A new Chromebook at a low price  could get ChromeOS moving forward

PREVIOUS EPISODES:

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

Boxee’s new UI focuses squarely on TV content.

Boxee TV will go on sale for $99 on November 1. The cloud DVR service will cost consumers an additional $15, which is only slightly cheaper than a month-to-month TiVo subscription, but Boxee hopes to make up for it with added features. Recordings stored in the cloud will be available for streaming both on Boxee TV as well as on any device with a web browser, including iPads  and mobile phones. Native apps for Android and iOS will launch at a later time, said Ronen.

Boxee will roll out the DVR service in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and D.C first, with Ronen telling me that the company wants to make sure that the cloud DVR infrastructure can scale up to the challenge. A launch in additional markets is planed for 2013.

The new Boxee TV device will come with a limited number of apps, which will include Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Vimeo and Pandora. However, many of the apps available on the existing Boxee Box won’t make it onto the new device. “We don’t believe that the user experience gets better with a thousand apps,” Ronen told me.

Boxee TV will come with a limited number of apps.

Boxee TV is being manufactured by D-Link, which also made the original Boxee Box. But aside from that, there are few differences between the two products. The Boxee Box looked like a futuristic cube; Boxee TV uses a much more standardized — and thus stackable — form factor. The Boxee Box emphasized social discovery and artsy Vimeo videos while Boxee TV focuses squarely on TV shows, with TV programming running in the background as soon as you turn on the device. The Boxee Box was based on an Intel chipset; Boxee TV uses a CPU from Broadcom.

Boxee also completely rebuilt its software from the ground up, ditching the code base of the XBMC open source project and replacing it with a customized embedded Linux solution. “It was very liberating for us,” Ronen said about this step.

The introduction of the new device means that Boxee will put the original Boxee Box in maintenance mode, with Ronen telling me that the company won’t be rolling out any major firmware updates for it anymore. That likely won’t go over well with Boxee’s small but very vocal base of early adopters.

Boxee TV will offer unlimited recording space in the cloud.

Ronen said that the company will soon announce a kind of loyalty offer for existing users who are willing to switch over to the new platform, but he also didn’t make a secret out of the fact that Boxee TV is meant to target a different and potentially much larger user base. “When you start a company, you want to solve a problem for yourself,” said Ronen. Now, Boxee was out to solve a problem for mainstream consumers ready to cut the cord, and generate revenue for the first time in its history, he added.

Boxee’s cloud DVR subscription service comes at a time when there’s a bit of a comeback for over-the-air, in part because consumers have been running into restrictions with some over-the-top content. Shows like American idol still aren’t available as full episodes online, but can be viewed for free and in HD via over-the-air broadcast feeds. A number of companies is looking to capitalize on those feeds and combine them with streaming and online apps. New York-based Aereo has been sued for its offering, and Simple.tv launched its DVR for cord cutters earlier this week.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

Boxee launched Cloudee as a private beta this summer. The service is currently completely free, without any upload and storage limits, but Boxee has said that it will eventually start charging for some premium functionality. From the announcement blog post:

Since Cloudee is still in beta, new and existing users will continue to enjoy free unlimited storage. When we introduce premium accounts, all beta users will still have access to watch and share all their videos, but may be asked to upgrade to Cloudee Premium to keep uploading additional videos.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen told me earlier this year that Cloudee will have some form of Boxee Box integration before the service’s beta test is over, possibly through a separate tab on the Boxee home screen.

There have also been speculations that Boxee could use some of Cloudee’s infrastructure to build a kind of cloud DVR for its Live TV feature, but the company has been mum on any details on that front. However, Boxee has been increasingly reaching out to Boxee Box users to test upcoming products, and possible candidates applying to be part of the company’s early access program are being asked which broadcast TV stations they’re receiving in their area — so we shouldn’t be too surprised if Boxee’s next big announcement is going to have some live TV component.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution