Boxee Purchased by Samsung; Cloud DVR goes dark

July 13, 2013

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Boxee has been purchased by Samsung for an unconfirmed $30 million by a number of media outlets. The set-top box maker and streaming media provider was among the early entrants and has battled against the space’s mainstays, AppleTV and Roku.

Personally, I found the user interface, inconsistency between apps, and overall offerings to be a real disappointment when I tried the Boxee a few years ago. Personally, I was hoping that Boxee would provide a good, easy-to-use, and alternate way of accessing lossless files and media and making that available to an audiophile setup.

Most recently, Boxee had tried expanding their offerings and had announced a cloud-based DVR service, which they discontinued on July 10th, leaving all users who had stored and not transferred their content out of luck.

What will happen going forward is anyone’s guess, but I find it unlikely that Samsung will be resurrecting Boxee in any substantive way. They will likely use the technology to integrate it into their TVs or look at a new, stand-along box to compete with the AppleTV.

No matter what happens, the big lesson is that when it comes to your media, never trust it exclusively to the “cloud” or another company. Thinking that those companies will never have problems or go out of business is naive at best. So whatever you do, always make sure that you have copies of your media!

The official announcement from Boxee is below:

We’re pleased to announce that the Boxee team will be joining Samsung.

We started on this journey six years ago, and have been at the forefront of the changing TV and video landscape. We believe that over the next few years the video market will change even more than it has in the past few decades.

Joining Samsung means we will be able to work on products that marry the best hardware and software in the TV space, products that will be used by tens of millions of people and will help to shape the future of TV.

We are excited about the next chapter for our team.

For Boxee users, we’re working behind the scenes to ensure there’s minimal impact to your devices. However, the beta Cloud DVR functionality we provided to certain Boxee TV users will be discontinued on July 10th. You will not have access to your existing recordings after that date. We realize many of you loved the service, and we’re sorry it won’t be available moving forward.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built, and we want to thank you for being a part of our journey.

Sincerely,

Team Boxee