The fallout from Samsung's acquisition of Boxee has already begun as the company plans to shut down Boxee's Cloud DVR service. The closure is scheduled to take place on July 10 at which time all customers will lose access to their stored television recordings.
Boxee made the announcement in a post on their front page. Visitors are told that staff is working behind the scenes to ensure minimal impact to devices already in the wild. Boxee TV never really realized its true potential but the DVR service was one of the unit's key features.
For $10 per month, Boxee Cloud DVR provided unlimited cloud storage for television recordings. Recordings never expired and users were even allowed to stream content directly to mobile devices.
Shuttering the service will no doubt impact a number of users but apparently it was a decision that had to be made. We don't know exactly how many customers will be affected as subscriber numbers haven't been release. What we do know, however, is that as of 2012, Boxee had sold less than 70,000 Boxee Box units.
The Boxee team said they realized many loved the Cloud DVR and apologized that it won't be available moving forward.
Looking ahead, Samsung said they plan to use Boxee technology across their portfolio of Internet-connected devices which includes smart televisions. The entire Boxee team will be joining Samsung during the transition as the two work to marry hardware and software in the TV space.