Boxee Delays Web TV Set-Top Box Five Months, Until November (AAPL, GOOG, SNE)

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Boxee, the NYC-based startup that makes software for watching web video, announced today that its first hardware gadget -- the "Boxee box" -- is taking longer than they had hoped to develop.

So instead of the set-top box going on sale around now, it's going to be five months from now -- sometime in November. (Maybe. This assumes no further delays.)

The bigger question is: Is anyone actually going to buy a web TV set-top box? Apple's Apple TV set-top box is a huge disappointment, and the company is reportedly going to come out with a cheaper, better one soon.

But there's still no indication that normal people want to buy and plug in yet another device in their living room, unless it's an incredible value proposition. Roku, for example, has not sold a zillion set-top boxes. Meanwhile, there's more competition on the way from Google, too -- the ambitious "Google TV."

The trouble with the Boxee Box seems to be getting the right balance of performance and cost. Boxee and hardware partner D-Link want the HD video playback to be as good as a computer can provide, but obviously can't charge as much as a computer costs for a living room add-on.

And as we see time and time again, the trouble with startups announcing first-time hardware several months before it's ready is that they often have to delay it.

Here's Boxee's blog post on the topic by cofounder/CEO Avner Ronen:

Earlier this week we got confirmation that the Boxee Box by D-Link will ship this November in US and Canada. 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.

We are looking forward to the November launch with D-Link and believe it will deliver a user experience that 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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