The new Boxee TV is an unassuming $99 device with a surprisingly radical feature: dual TV tuners. Plug the Boxee TV into your existing basic cable line or an HDTV antenna, and you’re watching television using a fast, fluid interface light years beyond anything from a cable company. Pay $14.99 a month and you get access to a second radical feature: a cloud-based DVR with unlimited storage that lets you play multiple shows simultaneously on PCs, phones, and tablets. You can even start a recording and watch it quasi-live from your phone with a slight delay. Not enough? Eventually you’ll be able to buy another Boxee TV and have those two tuners record to the cloud as well. Buy three Boxee TVs and you’ll get six tuners. There’s no limit.

"I compare it to moving from film cameras to digital cameras," says Boxee CEO Avner Ronen. "You don’t need to think about it. You want six seasons of Seinfeld? Go for it." The vagaries of copyright law mean that Boxee has to upload and store an individual copy of each show to the cloud for each user, but Avner’s not worried about it. "The cost of storage is going down all the time... which is a very liberating notion." The downside to putting all the storage in the cloud is that you won’t have much to watch if your internet goes down — Boxee TV doesn’t have any local storage.

You also get all the other stuff you’d expect, of course: Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, movie rentals from Vudu. There's even a Pandora apps for listening to music. But that’s input two stuff — Roku and Apple TV territory. Without TV tuners, those devices have to rely on hundreds of apps to stream content over the top, an approach Avner calls "a failed concept." That was ultimately the problem with 2010’s Boxee Box, a sharp-looking device that failed to gain traction as an app-based media streamer. "We’re not going to spend a lot more energy on that," says Avner.

Rebooting the product as Boxee TV and adding live television and a killer DVR to the mix allows Boxee make a serious claim to input one — and a serious claim to being the go-to device for cord cutters. "We want to pass the babysitter test." says Avner. "Just turn on the TV and watch something." The remote is far simpler than the previous version, with just a D-pad, home, back, menu, and play buttons, and dedicated buttons for Netflix and Vudu. Even the box is simpler — the striking, angular look of the Boxee Box has been replaced by a standard black box. The only hint of style is on the bottom, which is fluorescent green.

But the most important part of the Boxee TV package might well be the small bundled antenna — a little black stick that extends to just over two feet long in exactly the same manner as an old cordless phone antenna. That’s what gives you free access to a world of network television broadcast over the air — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and a host of other stations that still maintain large transmitters to bathe the country in glorious uncompressed HD. "If you have a digital antenna and good reception, it’s a beautiful picture," says Avner. "But the challenge is that most people don’t realize they can get it." If you don’t have good HD reception, Boxee will point you straight to basic cable, which will give you the same networks for a fairly small monthly fee.

What you don’t get, of course, are premium cable channels. There’s no ESPN, no HBO, no Showtime, no AMC. It is a fatal flaw if you’re addicted to Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad or the NFL RedZone channel, and Avner isn’t shy about it. "Some people have to watch every Yankees game or every Knicks game, and they’re not going to cut the cord because we have a nice new device." But he’s not backing down, either. "The reality is that 89 of the top 100 shows last year were on broadcast. 95 of the top 100 most-watched events were on broadcast. Most of what people are recording is on broadcast." The message is clear: pay less for cable, still get most of the shows you want, and spend a little of the savings to get your favorite cable shows elsewhere.