The Boxee Box dropped in 2010 and felt like it came from the future—until it didn’t. Built by D-Link and powered by Boxee’s custom media center software (which started as a fork of XBMC), it promised to make streaming dead simple, pulling in content from Netflix, YouTube, local drives, and even sketchy web sources. The hardware looked like a cube that got stuck mid-melt—cool, weird, and impossible to ignore. It had a slick remote with a QWERTY keyboard on the back, which was ahead of its time. But by 2012, Boxee shifted from this box to pushing its cloud DVR, and by 2013, Samsung bought them out and quietly pulled the plug. Great idea, just bad timing.