Boxee’s new Boxee TV devices is going to be exclusively distributed by Walmart. The retail giant will start selling Boxee TV devices later this week, according to a Bloomberg report. This will give Boxee an immediate retail footprint of 3000 stores, which will promote the device with display stations and additional marketing.
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. 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.
