Samsung making the right move by acquiring Boxee
I’ve been a longtime fan of Boxee and what Avner was building with that company. And not just because I was able to play ping pong with him once upon a time ;)
And the news this week that Boxee was acquired by Samsung shows that Avner was onto something and Samsung sees where the future is going. I’m sure the $30 million acquisition price is far less than Boxee was hoping for, but I believe they found a great home with Samsung.
Since moving to the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone recently, I’ve come to appreciate the work that Samsung is doing in the consumer electronics space. My general feeling is that Apple simply cannot stay ahead of the innovation in phones, computers, tv’s, etc, any longer. One company alone can’t do that. And because they are so closed in their ecosystem (you can’t run their operating system on non-Apple devices, nor can you play the media you buy from them on other devices, etc.), they’re going to be passed by companies like Samsung that continue to innovate and partner. And if Samsung is going to start boning up in the software department – where they are superior in electronics today they are equally deficient in software – they’ll be a formidably foe for all the big players in the space.
In my opinion, the living room and the automobile are the next two frontiers for companies like Samsung, Microsoft, Google and Apple to penetrate. Obviously the living room is going to come first as they’ve all been dabbling in it for many years. If the plan is to put Boxee into all new Samsung tv’s, I think Apple and Google are going to have to move quickly if they don’t want to be left out of this race.
Do you think this gives Samsung the edge in the race for the living room?
Jeff — it is exciting to learn that Boxee was sold to Samsung but I don’t think that Google or Apple have anything to worry about.
First, we don’t know what the Boxee-Samsung offering will be. The Boxee interface was supposed to be integrated into Viewsonic TV’s in 2011 (https://www.allthatiknow.com/2011/03/boxee-gets-cash-infusion-to-help-fend-off-google-tv/) but the project was scrapped within 6 months (https://venturebeat.com/2011/09/08/viewsonic-kills-boxee-hdtv/) due to lackluster interest. Boxee also tried their hand at a cloud DVR set-top box via an exclusive Walmart distribution deal but it was less than successful (https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Boxee-and-Walmart-Put-Disappointment-Under-the-Tree-86333.aspx).
Second, considering that this acquisition happened mid-year and manufacturing processes aren’t really agile, Samsung will be hard-pressed to get a viable solution (whatever it may be) by the 2014 Holidays. I think that it is going to take at least 6 months for the acquisition dust to settle and the team to get fully integrated before there’s a product to sell. I honestly expect that at the earliest we’ll see something from Boxee-Samsung at CES 2015. By that point, Google and Apple will likely have a 3rd generation product out.
Regardless, I am exciting about the prospects of seeing some real innovation come out of this acquisition.
Heard they were going to shut down the cloud dvr service but still it’s great news that Samsung picked it up. We’ll see how it plays out with the competition but I wish I held out since I just bought the Samsung UN65F6300(https://athomereviews.com/samsung-un65f6300-review). It’s hard keeping up with all these new features but it is exciting!