After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.

On the other hand, when I was able to watch the Tuesday episode on Wednesday (the Monday episode was still missing), performance was actually better than watching it on the website. I don’t know how or why, but the transitions to and from the commercial breaks happened more smoothly and with less wasted loading time than on the website.

So we have this unacceptable inability to find all the episodes combined with better playback when it does find the episodes. That complicates the decision a bit.