Digital Home Thoughts: The Boxee Box Has Some Competition: The Iomega TV

"The second coming of Boxee is here. Though D-Link was first to take the popular home theater PC interface and roll it into a standalone device with the Boxee Box, Iomega will take it own shot at the ultimate media streamer in February with Iomega TV. Despite sharing the same basic software, Iomega TV differentiates itself from D-Link's Boxee Box with a number of design changes designed to make it an up-market offering. Number one: It's the Celine Dion to D-Link's Lady Gaga. Iomega will ditch the love-it-or-leave-it styling of the Boxee Box in favor of a standard black-box design that blend in a little more in most staid home theater setups."

It's been a long time since I was impressed by anything that Iomega has done - I'm frankly baffled as to how/why they're still in business - but this looks like it might be a winner for them. If offers the same Boxee software experience as the D-Link product for an MSRP of $229.99 (no hard drive); $299.99 gets you a 1 TB internal hard drive, while $349.99 gets you 2 TB. I personally don't have the need for local storage on my Boxee Box, but for some people, this might be exactly what they've been waiting for.