This week I have streaming video content and TV on my mind. Actually I've had it on my mind for some time because some months ago I picked up a Panasonic BD 655 Blu-Ray player from Costco for $160.

This player comes with Panasonic's Viera Cast streaming service. Among the content sources supported is Netflix Watch Instantly which I immediately fell in love with.

To be able to have such a huge library of content more-or-less immediately available is amazing (I highly recommend the HBO Series "Spartacus" ... endless blood, gore, and lust; what more could you ask for from a sword and sandals epic?).

Viera Cast also supports YouTube, Picasa, Skype, Twitter, Bloomberg, The Weather Channel, and a number of other online services and, while it does a fairly good integration job, the Panasonic BD 655 user interface has a rather clumsy layout and lacks one thing: performance. The thing is ungodly slow.

Anyway, having got a taste for instantly available, high quality streaming online content I was ridiculously excited to get my hands on the Boxee Device, the much anticipated multimedia delivery platform from D-Link.

Click to see: Photo of Boxee

The shape of the Boxee is, I'm sorry to say, over-designed: It's a truncated cuboid that sits on its "cut" face. While this is sort of neat in an art show kind of way, it doesn't fit neatly on my entertainment equipment shelf; I wound up wedging it next to my DirecTV DVR so it sat up squarely upright with the rest of the gear.

I think D-Link should provide a piece of plastic to make up the missing slice so those of us who don't want a piece of high-touch design sitting around like the conversation piece from hell can easily rack it with the rest of our gear.

Anyway, my aesthetic grumblings aside, I really love this thing. If you peruse the photo above you'll see that there is one face with the cute Boxee logo which reminds me of Wallace's face from "Wallace and Gromit" turned by 45 degrees (my favorite W&G movie was "A close Shave"). Or maybe it's a frog's face ... but I digress.

Click to see: Photo comparing Boxee with Gromit

Anyway, on the back you'll find the Boxee's connectors: Besides a power connector there are left and right composite audio output jacks, an S/PDIF connector, an HDMI out port, an Ethernet connector, and two USB ports. There is also a memory card slot that supports SD, SDHC up to 32GB, and MMC cards.

Plug one end of the provided HDMI cable into the Boxee and the other into your TV, plug in an Ethernet cable connected to the Internet or have WiFi available (the Boxee has 802.11n/g/b built in), and plug in the power. Then, on the TV, select the Boxee HDMI input and you're ready to configure the device.

The Boxee comes with a neat two-sided remote; on one side it's got buttons for left/right/up/down, play/pause, select, and menu, on the other there's a full QWERTY keyboard; having a real keyboard is way better than trying to navigate around an on-screen simulation as many other products require. My only complaint is that the text on the QWERTY keyboard is hard to read in low light ... the key top characters need either backlighting or to be printed in bright white.

Configuration is straightforward and nothing that anyone with reasonable computer skills can't figure out; you select which network connection to use and configure it accordingly, then give your Boxee account login details (you can do this from the Boxee or from a Web browser). You can also set your location, block adult content, and add account services (sources of content and applications).

I've said that the Boxee streams Netflix but, you might be saying to yourself, "Self; what else does the Boxee Box do?"

Well, pretty much everything you might hope it would: It plays H.264, WMV9/VC-1, MPEG4, and MPEG2 video at 1080p at 30 fps and 1080i at 60 fps; displays photos, plays videos, has a CIFS client and server so you can access shared content on your local network, plays MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AIF/AIFF, AC3/AAC, OGG, FLAC, DTS, Dolby Digital and Dolby True HD audio files, can be remotely controlled, and runs an insane number of applications including Pandora, Netflix, YouTube, and interfaces for all of the major social networks (the official list is huge and then there are third party repositories as well!).

Oh, and it's got a Web interface and remote control software is available for IOS and Android smartphones (although I can't say I'm impressed ... these apps work and when you can't find the original remote they are great but given the polish of everything else about the Boxee the smartphone apps are disappointing).

To top off all of this coolness, if you think you can create a better remote control interface for the Boxee or if you want to build an application to stream your own content to the device then there's "an API for that" ... Boxee provides access to the platform through a Python API, a browser/JavaScript API, a GUI/XML API, an RSS/Library Specification, and a remote control interface API. I'm just starting to experiment with these interfaces and the documentation is really good and there's a sizable developer community supported by D-Link.

Note that the Boxee platform is a fork off the free and open source (GPL) XMBC Media center which results in Boxee being partially open source.

So how well does Boxee work? So far, over weeks of brutal testing and many episodes of Spartacus, it has performed flawlessly. No glitches, no crashes; nothing to complain about at all! The user interface is responsive, easy to navigate ... again, no surprises other than there are no surprises. This really is a great piece of engineering and even more impressively priced around $200.

As if all of the foregoing wasn't enough, the Boxee software is available, for free, to run on OS X (Intel only with 10.4, 10.5, or 10.6), Ubuntu (9.10 or 10.04), Windows (XP, Vista, or 7), and Apple TV. This means you can turn that spare laptop into a Boxee device or build your own custom Boxee hardware.

You won't be surprised to find that the Boxee Box gets a rating of 5 out of 5. This is one of the best multimedia devices I have ever tested. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a few more test episodes of Spartacus to get through ...

Gibbs will carry on testing in Ventura, Calif. Stream your thoughts to gearhead@gibbs.com.