New reports are emerging from the ether that Samsung has purchased popular online TV service Boxee, creator of such products as the Boxee TV media center suite on the PC/Mac, Boxee Box, and most recently Boxee Cloud DVR. Samsung has reportedly paid $30 million for the company as it hopes to make a bigger splash in the home entertainment market, currently largely dominated by Apple with their AppleTV set top box.
Samsung is of course the manufacturer of many different models of fairly high end TVs, including so called “Smart TVs” that feature online connected multimedia software right into the television’s firmware. Boxee’s excellent software seems like it would be a natural fit in one of these televisions, but then the question remains – is Boxee really that big of a name draw, and would you purchase a television with Boxee baked in?
Neither Samsung nor Boxee have yet confirmed the deal. We’ve reached out to both companies for some sort of statement, and will update this post if we hear anything back one way or the other.
Update 07/03 @ 1:47 PM EST: Samsung has just confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that they have indeed purchased Boxee. The full statement reads as follows:
Samsung has acquired key talent and assets from Boxee. This will help us continue to improve the overall user experience across our connected devices.
Via: All Things D / The New York Times
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