Samsung to shutter Boxee Cloud DVR on July 10th

Shawn Knight

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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.

boxee cloud dvr samsung boxee cloud dvr

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.

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I guess I never understood why spend 30 million and then change it to not even be the company they bought?
 
Nice. I'm still waiting to see what became of Nvelo since Samsung bought them. Not a damn peep, probably killed them off in order to sell bigger capacity SSDs.
 
Doesnt surprise me. This is the fad.

If you can integrate these technologies into the TV, who needs the box then. A good example of having it in the TV and not using the box is my PS3. I used to always watch Netflix on my PS3... it still has a superior implementation than my TV, but I'm able to access Netflix more than 30 seconds faster... probably a full minute because it comes on when my TV does.

The next step is to make the computer part of TVs modular so when hardware gets old they can swap it out. Less people will buy an entire new TV to run software, especially if the TV is not more than 4 years old and in great shape. They probably will not do it, so the set-top box come back again.
 
Why buy the company just to change it? Why not enter a partnership for the use of their technology? Samsung, you're becoming the big bad wolf.
 
Why buy the company just to change it? Why not enter a partnership for the use of their technology? Samsung, you're becoming the big bad wolf.

Patents! And concepts! And knowledge! They did not lay off anyone on the boxee team. They want their knowledge.
 
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