Boxee remote with QWERTY keyboard on back could become new standard

On Thursday, Boxee is teaming up with D-Link to launch an appliance for bringing Web video to TV. Photos of the Boxee/D-Link product have already been circulating, but on the opening night of CES Boxee revealed a little surprise: If you flip over the Boxee remote, it has a handy QWERTY keyboard on the back.

This is a great feature, simple but very useful. For a service like Boxee where you're dealing with some Web interaction on a TV, this is much better than messing with an on-screen keyboard like you have to do on the AppleTV and the new TVs with Yahoo Widgets. And, since the Boxee keyboard is built into the standard remote, it eliminates the need for a separate TV QWERTY like the Logitech diNovo Mini. I predict that companies like Samsung and LG that make Yahoo Widget TVs will "emulate" this Boxee keyboard on the back of the remote. In fact, with TVs becoming more interactive I could see this eventually developing into a standard feature.

To see it in action, take a look at this video clip that I shot of the Boxee remote at the CES Unveiled event on Tuesday: