The Boxee team reported a little over a week ago that, while at CES, they were approached by a few hardward manufacturers about potentially integrating boxee into various types of hardware.
I’m curious; would you like to see an all-in-one media player like boxee (similar to Windows Media Center, but with more integration of Web-based technologies like YouTube, Hulu and more) available as a set-top box? If so, what features would you expect to see in that device?
For me, I think it would be important to offer the following (assuming that you could legally include these items):
1) Make it sleak and small
2) Make it inexpensive to buy and use
3) Allow people to expand it as they see fit (allow hard drive additions, USB input, etc.)
4) Include a DVR
5) Allow users to plug in a USB device and copy items to/from the set-top box
On the boxee blog, they ask a few questions about the features, etc. that should be included if anything like this ever happens. They mention blu-ray a few times, but I just don’t see that being a feature that relates to this type of set-top box. I could see the boxee box having the capacity to plug a blu-ray player into it, but I just don’t see any reason at all to include one in the box. If you want to watch blu-ray, you use your blu-ray player. If you want to watch or listen to other digital media (hard drive-based digital media), you use your boxee box.
What do you think?