Boxee explains dropping PC and Mac clients at CES

I really liked Boxee until I discovered Plex and they ramped up the features. Plex is much better than Boxee and if anything they are expanding clients and platforms rather than removing them... Plex was almost the same thing as Boxee until they split off into a server / client model. The client keeps getting ported to more and more devices while the server is ported to more and more hardware and OS platforms. The latest Laika release is nothing short of astounding.

What's that saying about beggars being choosers? I find it amusing that so many of you seem to take it personally that a company that has been providing you with free software for years is choosing to focus to make its paid products better. Welcome to capitalism.

A staff of 20 is quite small when you factor in design, admin roles and development. I'd say at most half of that staff would be actual developers. That's not a lot of people to be maintaining mutiple code bases. Of course there were bugs!

I think it's great that they've chosen a direction to focus on. Their future products will be much stronger because of it. These people need to get paid for their hard work like the rest of us.

The software never worked properly 'en toto' for OS X. I'd much rather use a suite such as Plex to stream from the Mac to my HDTV anyway. It is an ongoing project that has really evolved and become polished in it's history.

Good riddance. Plex and XBMC are better anyway.

I've always loved Boxee, even though their v1.5 interface wasn't in any way better than their v1.0 interface.

And while I understand that they'd rather put their development resourced towards a financially more interesting future (a.k.a. the Boxee Box), I think their reason for abandoning the PC/Mac community is flat out insulting. If they think that there weren't a lot of people installing Boxee on a dedicated computer and use it as their mediacenter, how did Boxee get big in the first place? Being able to actually use a nice piece of software to dedicate our Mac Mini's as a dedicated server was thé reason that Boxee grew as much as they did. That sir, to me personally, I feel that you're lying through your teeth… so excuse me for saying this, but to most of us early adopters of your otherwise fantastic piece of software, it feels like a slap in the face with a lame excuse.

True, Plex's server application was a gift from heaven, but both Plex, XBMC and Boxee all had their strong and weaker sides. By the way, why don't we ever hear of MediaCentral anymore? They used to have a very nice app even before Front Row came out :)

Unless they pull something out of the hat, these guys will be hard pressed to be in business in 1o months.

No explanation why they removed the most used functionality from the latest boxee desktop - netflix, vudo, and pandora. And no licensing is not the reason. Its really a shame, boxee had a lot going for it.

If the company wants to change directions, that's fine; but their final update for Mac is a total mess of bugs.

720p video is squished with no way of fixing it, trying to identify unresolved videos causes an immediate crash, and the audio subroutine seems completely wonky. In effect, they've released a media centre that can't properly play media.

At the very least they need to put out a 1.5.1 update that fixes some of these issues before they drop development completely. Until then, we've downgraded to the last stable version which was (thankfully) archived on MacUpdate.

Was an explanation necessary? I thought it was pretty self-explanatory in their announcement:

"Thanks for beta-testing our software for us, chumps. Now that we've got a money-making product, we don't need you anymore. SEE YA!!!"

To tell the truth, after taking the time to get used to Plex, I'm glad Boxee dropped support, as Plex is infinitely better. Its separate server application is brilliant, and it can even stream all of your media to iOS devices and other computers. Boxee would never have done that.

There really needs to be a "Dislike" button...