FollowSamsung recently acquired set top box company called Boxee for $30 million. The internet media streaming service was taken over by Samsung on the 3rd of July. In the month of June, VentureBeat had reported that Boxee was looking for a buyer.
Boxee is a New York based firm and has its offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Boxee will continue to retain its 45 employees even after the acquisition. Boxee allowed users to view live TV, record videos on cloud storage, video-on demand service, and access internet applications. It is believed that Samsung has clinched the deal mainly to make the best use of Boxee’s talents and improve the features of its smart TVs.
On the 4th of July, Boxee announced that it will no longer offer cloud DVR service. Instead of storing the favorite videos on hard drive, Boxee allowed users to store their videos on its servers. The service enabled users to record television shows online. The recorded content could be accessed through internet anywhere and anytime. The recorded videos could be viewed within a period of one week.
Boxee was offering free service as well as paid DVR service for $10 monthly. Both the services allowed users to do unlimited recording. However, the availability of recorded files and the number of hours for watching per month were restricted.
The set top box provided by Boxee will not connect to Boxee service. However, the other services that were offered by the company like Pandora, MLBTV and Netflix will still remain accessible to the users of Boxee. The smart TV market has now become quite competitive and Samsung needs to do something to stay up in competition with Apple TV and Google TV.
Boxee offered an interesting set top box device. It had a very neat and good-looking device powered with sleek hardware. It came with a very good remote control and it included a QWERTY keyboard which made it pretty easy to search for content on the web. It had a powerful Intel Atom 1.2GHz CPU and came with features like support for third party apps, two USB slots, microSD card slot and 1080HD video playback.
When you access Boxee.com, it welcomes you with the following message. “We’re pleased to announce that the Boxee team will be joining Samsung.” Customers who purchased Boxee set top box for $99 do not need to worry as the company has promised to offer 90 days return policy for customers who purchased the device through their website. Devices that were purchased through retail outlets will be subject to return policies of the retail stores.
Samsung and Apple are fighting it out in the smartphone and table world. However, Boxee’s acquisition by Samsung has made very clear that the Korean tech giant wants to pit against Apple TV. Through Boxee, Samsung aims to enhance the overall user experience across their devices. Samsung is definitely going to use the technology of the acquired company in its smart TVs. Also, tech enthusiasts feel that Samsung may even enter the set top box arena to compete with Apple TV.
Apple is going to release a newer Apple TV soon. By that time, even Samsung may come out with a powerful device to taken on the Apple TV.
