Boxee tweeted recently that it has at least 200,000 Boxee Box users and 2 million total users, but the company said later that those were actually "outdated" numbers.
"@trace501 We can give you total users: 2 million total users (200k Boxee Box users)," the company said in a Thursday tweet.
However, a representative for Boxee said that the tweet was generated by an intern, and represented an "out of date" figure.
"We don't release numbers for Boxee Box sales - it was an intern handling our Twitter feed who quoted an outdated number," a Boxee representative said. "Since it's a D-Link product, we let them quote sales numbers. This year we surpassed 2 million users worldwide and while at this time the PC represents a bigger user base than the box, we expect that to shift by the end of this year."
A representative from D-Link confirmed that it had sold at least 200,000 Boxee Boxes, and that the number of Boxee Boxes plus the number of users of the now-discontinued PC client totaled more than 2 million. She declined to provide more details. D-Link also launched a $60 MovieNite box earlier this week that the company says doesn't directly compete with Boxee, although its functionality overlaps.
Such a small penetration wouldn't necessarily be surprising, though. In a 2011 report, In-Stat analyst Mike Paxton found that Apple clearly dominated a surprisingly small market for dedicated media streaming devices. A similar study released by the Leichtman Research Group on Thursday found that 38 percent of all U.S. households have at least one television set connected to the Internet via a video game system, a Blu-ray player, an Apple TV or Roku set-top box, and/or the TV set itself, up from 30 percent last year. But 28 percent use a video-game console to do so.
Apple TV or Roku set-tops are the only connected devices in 1 percent of all households, LRG found in its survey.
Most video streaming device makers sold just a few hundred thousand units to date, Paxton said late last year. Roku has sold 2.5 million units, according to USA Today, while Apple continues to top the field. Apple revealed in January that it sold 1.4 million Apple TVs last quarter and 2.8 million units last fiscal year, although it still regards it as a "hobby."
"None of these are shipping in any large volumes - a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there," Paxton said then, speaking of the smaller players. "It just doesn't make sense when there are so many other devices in the home that do it already."
For more, see PCMag's full review of the Boxee Box (slideshow below) and its new Boxee Live TV dongle. Also check out PCMag's interview with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen.
For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.
